The Autobiography and Other Writings

This authoritative Bantam Classic edition presents readers with a wide-ranging selection of Benjamin Franklin's most important writings, illuminating the complex and appealing character of this quintessential American who rose to fame as a publisher, inventor, educator, bon vivant, and statesman. Here are selections from Franklin's newspaper articles, from the sage wisdom ofPoor Richard's Almanac,from his entertaining letters, from his scientific essays, from his political and revolutionary writings, plus a generous sampling of his famous aphorisms, poems, and humor. And, most important, here is a newly edited text of one of the most vital and important works of American literature, theAutobiography. As fascinating and as relevant as ever, this timeless collection of writings reveals an extraordinary man whose mind was always curious, always questioning, and who forever remained dedicated to the principles of truth and liberty. From the Paperback edition.

Benjamin Franklin was called the "Father of all the Yankees" by Thomas Carlyle. He was the quintessential American, extolling the virtues of temperance, industry, and self-reliance-boosterism and babbitry to some, yet Franklin's life was often as titillating as his times. He ranged over the full extent of his society, and his wisdom reached the philosophers in Paris as easily as the man on the Philadelphia street. The man who would become a renowned Enlightenment deist was born to Puritan parents in Puritan Boston in 1706. His formal education ended when he was ten. He was apprenticed to his brother as a printer but left in 1723 to seek his fortune. He arrived in Philadelphia tired, hungry, and poor, not knowing a soul, but managed to obtain work as a printer. Franklin's rise to fame as a publisher, essayist, sage, statesman, scientist, and inventor, the early years of which he related in his Autobiography (written 1771-1788), was phenomenal. He brilliantly repudiated the Stamp Act before the English Parliament, then came home to help frame the Declaration of Independence. During the Revolution he went to Paris to forge an alliance with the French, where, in his fur hat and spectacles, he became the toast of French society, the embodiment of the noble simplicity and freedom of the New World. He returned to his newborn country triumphantly in 1785 and inspired the delegates at the convention in 1787 to adopt the Constitution unanimously before he died in 1790. To Franklin the country owes the University of Pennsylvania, the American Philosophical Society, America's first lending library, and the Franklin stove. He wrote on virtually every subject, from the witty Dogwood Papers (1722) and Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One (1773) to Experiments and Observations on Electricity (1751) and Poor Richard's Almanac.