Benjamin Franklin

Writing has been of Great Use to me in the Course of my Life, Benjamin Franklin said in his famous Autobiography. With characteristically calculated understatement, he attributed his enormous and varied successes to "my having learnt a little to scribble." This Library of America collection of Franklin's works begins with letters sent from London (1757-1775) describing the events and diplomacy preceding the Revolutionary War. The volume also contains political satires, bagatelles, pamphlets, and letters written in Paris (1776-1785), where he represented the revolutionary United States at the court of Louis XVI, as well as his speeches given in the Constitutional Convention and other works written in Philadelphia (1785-1790), including his last published article, a searing satire against slavery. Also included are the delightfully shrewd prefaces to Poor Richard's Almanack (1733-1758) and their worldly, pungent maxims that have entered our American culture. Finally, the classic Autobiography, Franklin's last word on his greatest literary creation--his own invented personality--is presented here in a new edition, completely faithful to Franklin's manuscript. A companion volume includes the complete "Silence Dogood" series, "Busy-Body" essays, and a generous selection of his early writings, including letters to the press, satires, and pamphlets. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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.

"The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin" is one of the most important and influential works in American history. It tells the story of Franklin's life from his humble beginnings to his emergence as a leading figure in the American colonies. In the process, it creates a portrait of Franklin as the quintessential American. Because of the book, Franklin became a role model for future generations of Americans, who hoped to emulate his rags to riches story. "The Autobiography" has also become one of the central works not just for understanding Franklin but for understanding America. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was a man of many roles-printer, author, philosopher, scientist, inventor, diplomat, and politician to name only a few. He lived a wide and varied life and found himself at the center of virtually every major event involving America during the second half of the eighteenth century. He was so successful as a businessman that he was able to retire at the age of 42. He proved equally adept at science, and his experiments in electricity made him the most famous American in the colonies. Politics and diplomacy occupied him for most of the latter half of his life.

Benjamin Franklin is one of the best known and most widely admired figures in American history. His wit and charm make him endearing; his practical intelligence and commitment to middle-class virtues like thrift and industry make him admirable. Indeed to many he is ‘the first American’. Ironically, this identification of Franklin with American popular culture diminishes the breadth and depth of his contributions to modern political thought. The present volume provides the textual foundation for a fuller understanding of Franklin’s thought, and represents a major addition to the Cambridge Texts series. Readers interested in the Autobiography will find a new and complete edition based on the original manuscript. Those interested in the full range of Franklin’s political ideas will find a selection of his most important letters, essays and pamphlets. Alan Houston’s lucid introduction brings life to these texts and sets them in their proper historical context.

Benjamin Franklin is one of the best known and most widely admired figures in American history. His wit and charm make him endearing; his practical intelligence and commitment to middle-class virtues like thrift and industry make him admirable. Indeed to many he is ‘the first American’. Ironically, this identification of Franklin with American popular culture diminishes the breadth and depth of his contributions to modern political thought. The present volume provides the textual foundation for a fuller understanding of Franklin’s thought, and represents a major addition to the Cambridge Texts series. Readers interested in the Autobiography will find a new and complete edition based on the original manuscript. Those interested in the full range of Franklin’s political ideas will find a selection of his most important letters, essays and pamphlets. Alan Houston’s lucid introduction brings life to these texts and sets them in their proper historical context.

The thirty-seventh volume of the collected writings and correspondences of the American statesman, ambassador, and Founding Father Benjamin Franklin This book, encompassing five months during 1782, promises to be one of the most significant volumes in the entire series of Benjamin Franklin’s papers. Between March and August, Franklin mastered one of the greatest challenges of his diplomatic career by establishing the framework for a peace agreement with Great Britain. The negotiations required enormous subtlety in order to mollify the French while also satisfying the British. Franklin’s success was based upon the same strengths he had demonstrated several years earlier during the lengthy search for an alliance with the French government: an unswerving confidence in the rectitude and ultimate triumph of the American cause, immense patience, and an aptitude for one of the diplomat’s most subtle arts—creating contrasting impressions for different audiences.

Written initially to guide his son, Benjamin Franklin's autobiography is a lively, spellbinding account of his unique and eventful life, now a classic of world literature that is sure to inspire and delight readers everywhere. Few men could compare to Benjamin Franklin. Virtually self-taught, he excelled as an athlete, a man of letters, a printer, a scientist, a wit, an inventor, an editor, and a writer, and he was probably the most successful diplomat in American history. David Hume hailed him as the first great philosopher and great man of letters in the New World.

Too often dismissed as the least philosophic of the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin had a deep and lasting impact on the shape of American political thought. In this substantial collection of Franklins letters, essays, and lesser-known papers, Ralph Ketcham traces the development of Franklins practicaland distinctly Americanpolitical thought from his earliest Silence Dogood essays to his final writings on the Constitution and The Evils of the Slave Trade.

Too often dismissed as the least philosophic of the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin had a deep and lasting impact on the shape of American political thought. In this substantial collection of Franklin's letters, essays, and lesser-known papers, Ralph Ketcham traces the development of Franklin's practical-and distinctly American-political thought from his earliest Silence Dogood essays to his final writings on the Constitution and The Evils of the Slave Trade.

The authoritative edition of Franklin’s autobiography, with a foreword by the eminent Franklin scholar Edmund S. Morgan “The best and most beautiful edition [of the Autobiography].”—J. H. Plumb, New York Review of Books “Among the many editions available—read Yale’s. Its text is the most reliable (the Franklin papers are at Yale) and its supplementary material is uniformly useful.”—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post A classic of eighteenth-century American history and literature, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography has had an influence perhaps unequaled by any other book by an American writer. Written ostensibly as a letter to his son William, Franklin’s Autobiography offers his reflections on philosophy and religion, politics, war, education, material success, and the status of women. Prepared by the editors of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, this definitive edition is drawn with scrupulous care from the original manuscript in Franklin’s handwriting, now in the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. The introduction by Leonard W. Labaree places the autobiography in literary and historical contexts. In a new foreword, eminent Franklin scholar Edmund S. Morgan writes about Franklin’s dual allegiance as an American and a subject of an English king—and his emergence as a leader of the American Revolution. This edition also includes biographical notes, a chronology of Franklin’s life, and an updated bibliography.