The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: Penn Reading Project Edition

By Benjamin Franklin, Peter Conn and Amy Gutmann

Printer and publisher, author and educator, scientist and inventor, statesman and philanthropist, Benjamin Franklin was the very embodiment of the American type of self-made man. In 1771, at the age of 65, he sat down to write his autobiography, "having emerged from the poverty and obscurity in which I was born and bred to a state of affluence and some degree of reputation in the world, and having gone so far through life with a considerable share of felicity." The result is a classic of American literature.

On the eve of the tercentenary of Franklin's birth, the university he founded has selected the Autobiography for the Penn Reading Project. Each year, for the past fifteen years, the University of Pennsylvania has chosen a single work that the entire incoming class, and a large segment of the faculty and staff, read and discuss together. For this occasion the University of Pennsylvania Press will publish a special edition of Franklin's Autobiography, including a new preface by University president Amy Gutmann and an introduction by distinguished scholar Peter Conn. The volume will also include four short essays by noted Penn professors as well as a chronology of Franklin's life and the text of Franklin's Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania, a document resulting in the establishment of an institution of higher education that ultimately became the University of Pennsylvania.

No area of human endeavor escaped Franklin's keen attentions. His ideas and values, as Amy Gutmann notes in her remarks, have shaped the modern University of Pennsylvania profoundly, "more profoundly than have the founders of any other major university of college in the United States." Franklin believed that he had been born too soon. Readers will recognize that his spirit lives on at Penn today.

Essay contributors: Richard R. Beeman, Paul Guyer, Michael Weisberg, and Michael Zuckerman.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Nov 24, 2010
• ISBN: 9780812200119

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was an American writer, printer, politician, postmaster, scientist, and diplomat. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Franklin found success at a young age as editor and printer of the Pennsylvania Gazette, a prominent Philadelphia newspaper. From 1732 to 1758, Franklin published Poor Richard’s Almanack, a popular yearly pamphlet that earned Franklin much of his wealth. An influential Philadelphian, Franklin founded the Academy and College of Philadelphia, which would become the University of Pennsylvania, in 1751. In addition, Franklin founded the Library Company of Philadelphia, as well as the city’s first fire department. As revolutionary sentiment was on the rise in the thirteen colonies, Franklin traveled to London to advocate on behalf of Americans unhappy with British rule, earning a reputation as a skilled diplomat and shrewd negotiator. During the American Revolution, his relationships with French officials would prove essential for the war effort, the success of which depended upon munitions shipments from France. Over the next few decades, he would serve as the first postmaster general of the United States and as governor of Pennsylvania while maintaining his diplomatic duties. A dedicated and innovative scientist, Franklin is credited with important discoveries regarding the nature of electricity, as well as with inventing the lightning rod, bifocals, and the Franklin stove. A slaveowner for many years, Franklin eventually became an abolitionist. Although he failed to raise the issue during the 1787 Constitutional Convention, he led the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society and wrote essays on the subject of slavery, which he deemed “an atrocious debasement of human nature.”

Book preview

The Penn Reading Project

PRP, as it is known on campus, was conceived in 1991 by a group of Penn faculty as a moment of shared intellectual interaction in the midst of the tumultuous freshmen move-in week—a chance for students and professors to meet in small groups and talk together about a book. The Bacchae, by Euripides, was the first PRP text. Since then the books have been as disparate as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

This year, for the fifteenth time, we will divide the freshmen class of 2,400 into more than 100 groups, each with a designated discussion leader. They will talk about Ben Franklin . . . and about themselves and their goals for the next four years.

What makes an ideal PRP text? There is no single answer. Elegant writing, interdisciplinary appeal, a sense of timeliness (and timelessness)—these are some criteria, and there are more. A committee of students, faculty, and staff is appointed each year to recommend a PRP text. Together they consider suggestions from the Penn community; what begins with a list of more than 100 books eventually becomes twenty; then ten, then one. The committee discussions are extraordinary, exhilarating, exhausting. I always leave feeling both smarter and more humble, and I believe everybody else does, too.

It was inevitable that Franklin’s University would read Franklin’s Autobiography. The 300th birthday celebration offers the perfect opportunity, but in any year this text measures up to all the PRP goals and exceeds them, setting a new standard for what will come next.

David Fox

Director, Penn Reading Project

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Penn Reading Project Edition

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Edited by Peter Conn

Preface by Amy Gutmann

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia

Copyright © 2005 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Autobiography text and notes originally published in Benjamin Franklin’s Own Story: His Autobiography continued from 1759 to His Death in 1790, with a Biographical Sketch Drawn from His Writings, edited by Nathan G. Goodman (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1937). Introduction adapted from Peter Conn, Literature in America: An Illustrated History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); used by permission.

ISBN 0-8122-1929-5

ISBN 978-0-8122-1929-6

Contents

Preface: The Power of Values, by Amy Gutmann

Introduction: Benjamin Franklin and the American Imagination, by Peter Conn

PART I. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, edited by Nathan G. Goodman

PART II. CRITICAL ESSAYS

Benjamin Franklin and the American Enlightenment, by Richard R. Beeman

Freedom of Reason, by Paul Guyer

An Inclination Joined with an Ability to Serve, by Michael Zuckerman

The Key to Electricity, by Michael Weisberg

APPENDICES

Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania, by Benjamin Franklin

A Chronology of Franklin’s Life, compiled by Mark Frazier Lloyd

Contributors

Preface

The Power of Values

AMY GUTMANN

Why should I care? What difference does it make? Some such question may be at the back of your mind as you pick up this special edition of the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, published especially for the Penn Reading Project by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Your participation in PRP carries no grade. No one will take roll. After you discuss Franklin’s Autobiography on Sunday, September 4, 2005 with fellow first-year students and a Penn faculty member, you may never again pick up the Autobiography.

So why bother?

Because Franklin is very much alive at Penn.

His famous personality and notable charisma helped to define a uniquely engaged American style and character, exemplified by many people you will meet at Penn. Franklin was not just a scientist (one of the world’s first). He was not only an educational theorist (breaking with the classical curriculum of his day). Franklin loved learning. But he also applied his theoretical knowledge to the practical tasks of invention and civic improvement, founding the school that became the University of Pennsylvania. In his times, he was a media mogul and business entrepreneur. He created a chain of print shops throughout the Colonies that would be the envy of any Penn Wharton graduate. In the ideas and the values that he put into practice, Franklin exemplified the life of an engaged and successful public intellectual.

Franklin’s ideas and values have shaped the modern University of Pennsylvania more profoundly than have the founders of any major college or university in the United States. The Penn Compact—From Excellence to Eminence—is inspired by values that Franklin held dear: increasing access to education, integrating knowledge, and engaging with communities locally and globally, informed by broad-based knowledge. Franklin’s ideas are clearly alive here at Penn in ways that really are quite remarkable. Your challenge in the next few months—and throughout the next four years—is to figure out how these values, and all that Penn is and strives to be in fulfilling them, can help you shape your own life to come. There’s no better starting place for that journey than Franklin’s Autobiography.

Were Franklin to walk into my office in College Hall today, he would understand most of the topics he would hear discussed: the nature of the undergraduate educational experience; the challenge of integrating knowledge from the liberal arts and the professions to understand today’s most difficult problems; the need to translate faculty and student research into real applications that will improve human lives; the important civic role of the University as Philadelphia’s largest private employer and a powerhouse of urban revitalization; the need to raise new funds to ensure that no qualified student is ever deprived of a Penn education merely because he or she cannot afford it; and the importance of engaging communities here at home and around the world. All these and many more issues of our day would be immediately familiar to Franklin. They embody and express the values and ideas to which he was committed and which inspired his Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania (1749), included in this volume, and the founding of what became the University of Pennsylvania.

Most important, Franklin would recognize the commitment to personal excellence—and to the ambition that drives the excellent to seek eminence—which is so characteristic of Penn today and of its faculty, students, staff, and alumni. All these are values that guided Franklin throughout his life, and they are as relevant to your life and your choices as they were to his.

The Value-Driven Life

Reason was Franklin’s guide in life, making him an exemplar of the Enlightenment values and spirit that would characterize the young American Republic. But Reason was not Franklin’s sole value. Utility, honesty, service, knowledge, and creativity—these were also among Franklin’s core values. They shaped his life, and the Autobiography is the story of that shaping. "His Autobiography is in many ways, Michael Zuckerman observes, an account of the means by which he cultivated his own benevolence."

This formative role that values played in Franklin’s life is evident across the spectrum of his activities, but most especially in his interpersonal relations. Paul Guyer argues that, in Franklin’s phrase, "truth, sincerity and integrity in dealings between man and man" guided Franklin’s dealings with others in business, civic life, government, diplomacy, and his personal life.

Some historians have argued that this picture of Franklin as virtuous and self-critical is merely an image that he labored consciously and assiduously to fabricate during his lifetime. There can be little doubt that self-promotion and personal reinvention were among Franklin’s strongest skills. Yet are these faults, if employed for public purposes? Nothing was more central to the Enlightenment values of Reason and individual self-determination than that all individuals freely choose for themselves that which they would become. Depending on the direction such self-determination takes, we will admire or criticize individual examples of personal invention and reinvention. As Franklin noted with his characteristically pointed wit, A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle.

Throughout his life, Franklin carried on a rich, consequential, and increasingly frank dialogue with himself concerning his own successes and mistakes. His is a life that models the kind of self-questioning and self-creation that goes on in Penn’s classrooms, College Houses, and coffeehouses, day in and day out. His is the kind of self-criticism and self-understanding that is at the core of socially responsible and creative living.

Choice, Challenge, and Commitment

One of the most remarkable and admirable features of Franklin, which distinguishes him from both moralizers and practitioners of his day and ours, was that he understood that choosing an admirable future is not enough. After the choice, the hard work begins. This, too, is an experience that awaits you here at Penn and in later life.

Franklin understood that the distance between good intentions and reality is the measure of one’s life. It is not easy to commit yourself to this or that system of values. Yet how much harder is it to act effectively in accord with your values over the course of your lifetime? As early as age twenty, Franklin made periodic self-evaluation and self-criticism a regular feature of his life, so much so that Walter Isaacson calls him the patron saint of self-improvement guides. Franklin measured his progress against his earlier choices, reconfirmed or modified those choices, and redoubled his efforts to act in accordance with his values.

As Franklin’s university, Penn institutionally engages in a similar process. We set strategic goals. We dedicate our best efforts to reaching them. We periodically measure our progress and critically examine our results. We correct our course, and recommit ourselves to our most basic ideals. We do this as individuals, as scholars and scientists, as a university, and as a community. We try never to let our failures dissuade us from our values—nothing worth doing is done easily. Above all, we resist becoming complacent with success. Whether facing short-term failure or success, there is always much more to be done.

Franklin played the game of chess throughout his life, and he saw it as a useful model from which to learn foresight, circumspection, and caution, but above all persistence: "And, lastly, we learn by chess the habit of not being discouraged by present bad appearances in the state of our affairs, the habit of hoping for a favorable change, and that of persevering."

True Merit

Franklin’s lifelong effort at self-improvement aimed not only at successful self-presentation, but also at the ideal of true merit or virtue. This ideal is precisely the goal that Franklin enunciated for a Penn education. "True merit," Franklin wrote, consists in "an inclination join’d with an ability to serve mankind, one’s country, friends and family; which ability is (with the Blessing of God) to be acquir’d or greatly encreas’d by true learning; and should indeed be the great aim and end of all learning."

True merit is, in the spirit of the Penn Compact, the continuing task of this University and all who work, study, and live within its confines. I welcome you with the utmost of pleasure and the highest of expectations to our Penn fellowship of learning, self-improvement, and worldly success. And I invite you to begin your personal journey here, in the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

Introduction

Benjamin Franklin and the American Imagination

PETER CONN

Benjamin Franklin himself was the first American who answered the New World’s need to prove its cultural worthiness. He was the colonies’ first world citizen, receiving homage on both sides of the Atlantic as the man who personified the peculiar genius of America. Self-reliant, unpretentious, yet thoroughly accomplished, Franklin seemed to be the long-awaited new man. A French contemporary, paying double tribute, addressed Franklin as the man who snatched the lightning from the sky and the scepter from the tyrant. He was born in Boston early in the eighteenth century, in the twilight of Puritan predominance. His career is a bridge connecting America’s past and future. He became Philadelphia’s most famous adopted son, a writer, businessman, and scientist of international stature. Late in his long career, he played a leading role in the struggle for independence and then served as a senior officer of the new nation he had helped create. His life story, an almost archetypal journey from ordinary beginnings to luminous success, has been etched permanently into America’s folklore. More than any other early American, Franklin invented the vocabulary in which the New World’s aspirations would henceforth express themselves.

Franklin started working for his father, a Boston soap and candle maker, at the age of ten. Two years later he was apprenticed to his half-brother James, the editor of a newspaper, the New England Courant. It was in the Courant that Franklin, still in his teens, published the Dogood Papers, a series of essays in the fashion of the Spectator. Written over a signature of Silence Dogood, the fictitious widow of a parson, fourteen essays appeared between March and October 1722. The titles of the Dogood Papers suggest their range, from Freedom of Thought to Drunkenness to Pride and Hoop Petticoats.

Franklin’s shrewd common sense, his humor, and his free-thinking irreverence are already visible in these precocious essays. In the seventh paper, for example, he dismantled the Puritan elegy. A century of relentless elegizing had reduced that honorable genre to arid formulas and hackneyed similes. Franklin expressed his amused contempt by offering Mistress Dogood’s Receipt to Make a New-England Funeral Elegy. For the subject, she confides, any recently departed neighbor will serve, though it will be best if he went away suddenly, being kill’d, drown’d, or froze to death. Rehearse all the excellences of the deceased, and if he have not enough, you may borrow some to make up for a sufficient Quantity. Finally, make ample use of double rimes such as power, flower; quiver, shiver; grieve us, leave us . . . expeditions, physicians; fatigue him, intrigue him, etc. You must spread all upon paper, and if you can procure a scrap of Latin to put at the end, it will garnish it mightily.

Within a year of publishing the Dogood Papers, and following a dispute with his brother, Franklin left Boston and embarked on his legendary pilgrimage to Philadelphia. There he made his reputation and his fortune, establishing himself as the city’s leading printer and, eventually, its leading citizen. For a quarter of a century, until 1758, he published annual installments of Poor Richard’s Almanac. Almanacs, which were essentially calendars surrounded by serious and frivolous information, were popular throughout the colonies. Poor Richard became the most successful of the almanacs, but it is also typical in its mixture of science and proverbs, curiosities and humor. Franklin’s literary technique in the almanacs consists principally in the multiplication of aphorisms, some of them original, others borrowed. Capitalizing on the popularity of the almanacs, Franklin later published a discourse known as The Way to Wealth, in which his adages were strung together and put in the mouth of an old man called Father Abraham.

If time be of all things the most precious, wasting time must be, as Poor Richard says, the greatest prodigality; since, as he elsewhere tells us, lost time is never found again; and what we call Time enough, always proves little enough: Let us then up and be doing, and doing to the purpose; so by diligence shall we do more with less perplexity. Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all easy, as Poor Richard says; and He that riseth late must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night; while Laziness travels so slowly, that poverty soon overtakes him, as we read in Poor Richard, who adds, drive the business, let not that drive thee; and early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.

Franklin’s homely encyclopedia of bourgeois virtues teeters toward self-parody in its jaunty optimism and its commitment to the main chance.

The Franklin of The Way to Wealth is indeed the benevolent materialist who presides rather smugly over America’s imagination of success. It is this Franklin who has attracted his share of detractors, most famously English novelist D. H. Lawrence. I do not like him, Lawrence said of Franklin. It has taken me many years and countless smarts to get out of that barbed wire moral enclosure that Poor Richard rigged up.

Lawrence shrank Franklin into the pinched and frugal patron of success and respectability. Such an indictment has its point, but it represents at best only one side of Franklin’s complex character. Franklin was the most fully developed American example of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. He was a member of the prestigious Royal Society of England—the only colonist since Cotton Mather to be so honored—and in the course of his long life he took the whole range of science and politics for his proper study. Like his Enlightenment contemporaries in Europe, Franklin believed in the ultimate good order of the universe and the progress of humanity. He believed that the lives of ordinary men and women could be altered and improved by the intervention of science and good sense. His essays and letters contain the records of experiments on heat, earthquakes, optics, music, lightning, and electricity. He invented a more efficient stove, bifocal glasses, a popular harmonica; he set up America’s first public library, first city hospital, first learned society; he published one of the colonies’ first political cartoons. He founded the school that eventually became the University of Pennsylvania. In short, Franklin was equally devoted to self-promotion and the common good. And he was one of the most inquisitive, curious, and intellectually restless individuals this nation has ever produced.

Franklin’s rise to international prominence signaled the end of Puritan hegemony, yet the residual influence of Puritan ideology is everywhere visible in his life and writings, as it would be in America’s subsequent intellectual history. Franklin’s sense of American mission and his conception of the public responsibility of private persons both derive in some measure from his Puritan heritage. His Autobiography, his best-known work, shows the influence of his Puritan predecessors. Several of the virtues he praises, among them industry and thrift and temperance, are legacies from earlier New England culture. In addition, the introspective journals and the saintly biographies of men and women like John Winthrop, Thomas Shepard, and Anne Bradstreet, while they are distant in spirit from Franklin’s book, are quite similar in design and structure. Like the earlier Puritans, Franklin offers his life as a representative instance, a model of trial, pilgrimage, and success intended for the edification and instruction of others. The determinative difference, of course, is that Franklin’s Autobiography narrates a purely secular journey, in which reason has become his guide, the rewards have become earthly, and heaven has become a vaguely evocative metaphor for the unknowable and therefore peripheral beyond.

Within its worldly context, the self-portrait Franklin paints has a figurative and even allegorical significance. In this remarkable story, the strands of the American myth converge. Here is the poor boy who finds the way to wealth, the chartered servant who earns his freedom, the colonial subject who takes up the cause of national independence.

Franklin began writing the Autobiography in 1771 and worked on it intermittently until 1788. Since he traces his life only up to 1757, his tale is one of vigor and promise and first success. That is undoubtedly one reason for the book’s two centuries of popularity: nothing of old age or decline intrudes, and young America finds a young hero. Furthermore, Franklin devised a style to match his subject. His chief legacy to American letters is the strong, lucid prose in which the Autobiography is written, a prose stripped of excess ornament, which captures the accents of real speech. Franklin’s description of his arrival in Philadelphia exemplifies his style. On a Sunday morning in October 1723, he stepped out of the boat that had brought him from New Jersey and found himself on the Market Street wharf:

I was in my working dress, my best clothes being to come round by sea. I was dirty from my journey; my pockets were stuff’d out with shirts and stockings; I knew no soul, nor where to look for lodging. I was fatigued with travelling, rowing, and want of rest, I was very hungry; and my whole stock of cash consisted of a Dutch dollar, and about a shilling in copper.

The scene recalls William Bradford’s doleful memory of pilgrims washed ashore on the unfriendly New England coast, but answers Bradford’s fears with hope.

I walk’d up the street, gazing about till near the market-house I met a boy with bread. I had made many a meal on bread, and inquiring where he got it, I went immediately to the Baker’s he directed me to, in Second-street; and ask’d for bisket, intending such as we had in Boston; but they, it seems, were not made in Philadelphia. Then I’d ask for a three-penny loaf, and was told they had none such. So not considering or knowing the difference of money, and the greater cheapness nor the names of his bread, I bad him give me three-penny worth of any sort. He gave me, accordingly, three great puffy rolls. I was surpriz’d at the quantity, but took it, and, having no room in my pockets, walk’d off with a roll under each arm, and eating the other. Thus I went up Market-street.

As he walked up Market Street into history and myth, Franklin created one of the most durable scenes in America’s literary record.

Part I

The Autobiography

TWYFORD,¹ at the Bishop of St. Asaph’s, 1771.

DEAR SON:² I have ever had pleasure in obtaining any little anecdotes of my ancestors. You may remember the inquiries I made among the remains of my relations when you were with me in England, and the journey I undertook for that purpose. Imagining it may be equally agreeable to you to know the circumstances of my life, many of which you are yet unacquainted with, and expecting the enjoyment of a week’s uninterrupted leisure in my present country retirement, I sit down to write them for you. To which I have besides some other inducements. Having emerged from the poverty and obscurity in which I was born and bred, to a state of affluence and some degree of reputation in the world, and having gone so far through life with a considerable share of felicity, the conducing means I made use of, which with the blessing of God so well succeeded, my posterity may like to know, as they may find some of them suitable to their own situations, and therefore fit to be imitated.

That felicity, when I reflected on it, has induced me sometimes to say, that were it offered to my choice, I should have no objection to a repetition of the same life from its beginning, only asking the advantages authors have in a second edition to correct some faults of the first. So I might, besides correcting the faults, change some sinister accidents and events of it for others more favourable. But though this were denied, I should still accept the offer. Since such a repetition is not to be expected, the next thing most like living one’s life over again seems to be a recollection of that life, and to make that recollection as durable as possible by putting it down in writing.

Hereby, too, I shall indulge the inclination so natural in old men, to be talking of themselves and their own past actions; and I shall indulge it without being tiresome to others, who, through respect to age, might conceive themselves obliged to give me a hearing, since this may be read or not as any one pleases. And, lastly (I may as well confess it, since my denial of it will be believed by nobody), perhaps I shall a good deal gratify my own vanity. Indeed, I scarce ever heard or saw the introductory words, "Without vanity I may say," etc., but some vain thing immediately followed. Most people dislike vanity in others, whatever share they have of it themselves; but I give it fair quarter wherever I meet with it, being persuaded that it is often productive of good to the possessor, and to others that are within his sphere of action; and therefore, in many cases, it would not be altogether absurd if a man were to thank God for his vanity among the other comforts of life.

And now I speak of thanking God, I desire with all humility to acknowledge that I owe the mentioned happiness of my past life to His kind providence, which lead me to the means I used and gave them success. My belief of this induces me to hope, though I must not presume, that the same goodness will still be exercised toward me, in continuing that happiness, or enabling me to bear a fatal reverse, which I may experience as others have done; the complexion of my future fortune being known to Him only in whose power it is to bless

Reviews for The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

[longhorndaniel · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Was fun to read what Franklin had to say not only about himself but about his beliefs and society as well; essential reading for any serious history student/buff

[histreader · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This autobiography is written as a letter, once interrupted for a decade or more, to his son. As many people have pointed out during history, the author is inclined to only include the facts they want and from their point of view. A self-congratulatory tome, Benjamin Franklin has much for to be proud of himself. I enjoy his writing style and found this book to be interesting.

[redthing · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An interesting autobiography of an interesting man, though he did seem kind of arrogant.

[soylentgreen23 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A very interesting autobiography - I knew nothing of Franklin's early years, when he worked so successfully in publishing. A lot of what we love so much here on Library Thing might have been impossible without his good work.

[keegopatrick · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I personally think that this was one of the best books that I have ever read. I do not think that everyone will agree with me but I love Benjamin Franklin. He is by far my favorite character from the American Revolution! This was my second time reading this book and it was much better the second time. I think that it had a lot to do with me being older and being able to relate to the things that Mr.Franklin talks about such as virtue, temperance and other things along those lines that you really just do not start to understand until you have a few years under your belt lol. This edition was also really cool because it is not only the autobiography but also other selected writings from Ben Franklin. Some of these letters and other short writings were really good and only serve to help the reader get a better understanding of some of the points that Franklin was getting at in his autobiography. I would recommend this book to anyone with a appreciation for history!

[jculkin-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Well I found out only in reading that it wasn't complete! That surprised me. The title really should be changed to 'The Unfinished...' or something similar.

Started off so well! An awesome insight into the path this god of industriousness took from adolescence to adulthood. The best part was his account of how he settled his printing business in Pennsylvania, and how he carried out his life in general at that time, and how he learned to deal with people. It petered off half way and became mainly an account of politics and goings-on, still with the backdrop of his ridiculous industriousness.

The first part was 5/5, but the the book is not coherent so 3/5. Looking forward to a biography

[regoodrich · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Though the reading is a little rough at times due to an older style of English writing, I found myself entertained and impressed by this life account by Benjamin Franklin. He was a highly-accomplished man of greater wisdom than most. It was interesting to read how he came up with the ideas and then carried them through to form the first public library in Pennsylvania as well as a volunteer fire department and what you might call a handy 'road crew'. Not to mention vast public undertakings that were successful via his participation. What I especially enjoyed was his list of personal virtues--character traits he purposefully molded into himself to become a better husband, friend, neighbor, and individual. Benjamin Franklin was by choice a grand fellow.

[gshuk_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

There must be better audio out there on Benjamin Franklin. It was an autobiography so it was interesting hearing it from his perspective. That said it ended to early in his life for it did not even cover the revolution. Also, one has to focus due to the use of 18th century words and phrases. Overall it was very dry.

[diwanna_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Some excellent points about how to plan your life and successes betwixt Benjamin's personal adventures. A worthwhile read, because of the picture your get of our most industrious founding father, and the insight that can be gleaned from his regimented lifestyle.

[jimmaclachlan · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've tried reading this a dozen times over the years & had trouble with it. I finally did get through it & am very glad I did. Very interesting man, but not my style of writing.

[brett_in_nyc · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An all time favourite. Glimpse into the charm and character of one of the leading early Americans. And, a lot of talk about other characters too, much of which still holds true today. Also, a look at the guilt of an ambitious, maybe self absorbed father late in life toward his alienated and distant son. Maybe this personality type is a trait of the great American archetype? Is it a requirement for success here?

[goodwillbooks · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is the story of Benjamin Franklin in his own hand and it is a fascinating story. Living in the Philadelphia area, I've been familiar with Benjamin Franklin all my life, but as is always the case, did not have a true appreciation for the man. His story is almost awe-inspiring, and, despite criticisms that he was a "shameless self-promoter", his contributions to American life are genuine and their impact is still felt today. In fact, there are other accomplishments that I learned last year during his 300th birthday celebration (e.g. he was the first man to truly identify, appreciate and actually measure, the Gulf Stream), which I don't recall from his autobiography. He embodies the saying, "Most men see things as they are and ask 'Why?'; others see things as they could be and ask, 'Why not?'". I enjoyed this book and recommend it.