In, "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin," the life story of one of the most important figures in American history is recounted. The book tells the story of Franklin's early days as a printer, publisher and inventor through to the year 1757 where the Autobiography ends uncompleted. Franklin wrote this autobiography during three different periods in his life and it is supposed that it is left unfinished due to his dying before its completion. There may be no greater figure in American history than Benjamin Franklin and here the reader will delight in an intimate portrait of the man.

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

By Benjamin Franklin

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Copyright © 2005 Benjamin Franklin
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781420922387

Introduction

In any discussion of American origins, Benjamin Franklin is a good man to begin with. Years before the United States existed, he started things that his countrymen continue to be proud of -- libraries, civic clubs, volunteer fire departments, effective street lighting, and efficient heating devices. He was solidly American, ingenious, practical, ambitious, and successful. His Autobiography testifies that his feet were firm on the ground, but that he did not stand still. No man of his time went so far, and few of any time have gone farther. But, because he not only started things, but also let it be known that he did, Franklin may sometimes be credited with more than he deserves. That is one reason why he stands confidently at the head of any native literary procession. Talking about himself, he produced his country's best masterpiece.

Like Walt Whitman and Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, Franklin created a public image so attractive that it obscures the man who made it. Whatever influences of time or place or circumstance combined to produce the successful, whimsical and plain-spoken homespun favorite remembered as Ben Franklin, the projection of this character was a literary exploit of magnitude. "He knew what he was about, this sharp little man," said D. H. Lawrence. "He set up the first dummy American." Certainly Horatio Alger could not have done so well in celebrating the stereotype rise from rags to riches if Franklin had not invented it. It could have bothered neither man that, like almost all of Franklin's devices, the invention was mechanical. This was something never forgotten from his New England boyhood, that everything could be set in a row and counted.

When Thomas Carlyle called him the father of all Yankees, he meant something of that sort, and when Leigh Hunt explained that "Americans are Englishmen with the poetry and romance taken out of them," he meant much the same. Carl Van Doren has spoken of Franklin's magnificent centrality and of the flexible equilibrium of his talents, because, too busy or too wise to become any one thing, Franklin managed all things, including himself, with casual efficiency: "Mind and will, talent and art, strength and ease, wit and grace met in him as if nature had been lavish and happy when he was shaped. Nothing seems to have been left out except a passionate desire, as in most men of genius, to be all ruler, all soldier, all saint, all poet, all scholar, all some one gift or merit or success."

Perhaps in colonial America more than in most places, versatility was a becoming achievement -- combined with self-control, recognition of limits beyond which, as Hemingway later was to explain, no man could successfully venture. Franklin painstakingly defined himself as a man who kept within bounds, discovering such satisfaction in handling what was set before him that he seldom was tempted to stretch for more. Reality was what he could see or feel, even at the end of a kite string, and he was too sensible to suspect that gods of the sky might smite him down in anger. That was what Melville must have meant when he said that Franklin's mind was grave, but never serious.

Rightfully proud of the range of his experience, Franklin was pleased when other people mistook breadth for depth, but he never fooled himself, or let himself down. When something was to be said, he prepared it carefully, so that it could be said well, for Franklin recognized his deficiencies, especially when it came to conversation. He did not extemporize easily. Like Mark Twain, he was best in monologue, skilled at fitting tales to special situations and, if uninterrupted, could spin out a pretty compliment or an effective satire. In temperament a tranquil man, he is not known to have been disturbed by unpleasant dreams, though he had wit enough to invent nighttime fantasies for recitation in flirtatious badinage with appreciative ladies. It did not seem strange to him that French women preferred to be kissed on the neck rather than on cheek or lips where makeup might be disordered.

Contented with surfaces because surfaces served him well, Franklin probably would have understood Melville's admiration for men who dived deeply, even to inevitable failure, but he would not have shared it. Better safe, he might have said, than sorry. He would have been pleased at Melville's description of him as "printer, postmaster, almanac maker, essayist, chemist, orator, tinker, statesman, humorist, philosopher, parlor man, political economist, professor of housewifery, ambassador, projector, maxim-monger, herb-doctor, wit: -- Jack of all trades, master of each and mastered by none -- the type and genius of his land." He might have nodded in sage pretense of understanding when Melville went on to say, "Franklin was everything but a poet"; but surely he would have known exactly what Carl Van Doren meant when a century later he described Franklin as the best writer in America.

Even when the Autobiography is placed to one side, Franklin's place among native men of letters seems secure. In the Dogood Papers, submitted while still in his teens to his brother's New England Courant, he produced his country's first series of periodical essays. His "Speech of Polly Baker" some twenty years later applies for place as America's first successful short story. As a satirist in such essays as "Rules for Reducing a Great Empire to a Small One" and "An Edict of the King of Prussia," he has been compared to Swift and Voltaire. The "bagatelles" which he produced as an elderly man's avocation during his residence in France are written in such gracious but plainspoken prose that they alone could ensure his reputation as a stylist. As a letter writer, he was superb -- witty, wise, informative, and ingratiating.

The maxims which Franklin imported from abroad and reshaped to native idiom for Poor Richard's Almanac have been familiarly repeated by many generations. Father Abraham's brief treatise on "The Way to Wealth" became even in Franklin's lifetime cherished as a minor classic, often reprinted, widely translated. His "Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress" gave local habitation to an ancient smoking-room axiom, retold with mock solemnity. Franklin spoke seriously about education, economics, politics, and science; but he liked also to recount whoppers about American sheep with tails so heavy that carts had to be provided to support them. He wrote drinking songs and funeral elegies, and made verses in praise of his "plain country Joan" ("Blest the day that I made her my own").

As a young man, Franklin composed A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain, and through many of his later years planned an erudite treatise on "The Art of Virtue" which he never got around to putting on paper. Instead, he wrote the Autobiography, in which he presented the image of the personage remembered as Ben Franklin. To most people this personage is an amalgam of Poor Richard, Father Abraham, the young man who caught electricity with a kite, the sagacious old man in spectacles and fur cap who charmed all Europe, and the boy who was born, it is often said, in Philadelphia at the age of seventeen, trudging its dusty streets with giant loaves of bread under each arm, laughed at then, but probably for the last time -- these, and much more: satirist, humorist, storyteller, essayist, letter writer, jokester, precisionist, and punster. What Benjamin Franklin really was is concealed...