A short life of the author
Benjamin Franklin (17 January 1706 – 17 April 1790) was an American polymath — printer, writer, natural philosopher, inventor, civic leader, diplomat, and statesman — who was the most versatile genius produced by colonial America and who, more than any other figure, embodied the Enlightenment ideal of the self-made, self-improving, empirically minded citizen. His Autobiography (written intermittently between 1771 and 1790, published posthumously) is the foundational text of the American success story, and his Poor Richard’s Almanack (1732–1758) supplied the proverbial wisdom — “Early to bed and early to rise,” “A penny saved is a penny earned,” “God helps those who help themselves” — that became the moral furniture of the American mind.
Life
Franklin was born in Boston, the fifteenth of seventeen children of a candle and soap maker. He was apprenticed at twelve to his brother James, a printer, and at seventeen ran away to Philadelphia, arriving with a single Dutch dollar and three puffy rolls — one of the iconic scenes of American autobiography. He established his own printing business, published the Pennsylvania Gazette, and through relentless industry, thrift, and social intelligence became the most prominent citizen of colonial Philadelphia.
His scientific investigations — particularly his experiments with electricity, culminating in the legendary kite experiment (1752) — earned him international fame and election to the Royal Society. He invented the lightning rod, the Franklin stove, bifocal glasses, and the glass armonica. He founded the American Philosophical Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Pennsylvania Hospital.
As a diplomat and statesman, he served as colonial agent in London, negotiated the French alliance that made American independence possible, served at the Constitutional Convention, and was the only person to sign the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Alliance with France, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution.
The Autobiography
Franklin began writing his autobiography in England in 1771 and worked on it intermittently until near his death. It was published posthumously in various editions, with the first complete English edition appearing in 1868. The Autobiography covers Franklin’s life from his Boston childhood through his scientific and civic achievements in Philadelphia — it breaks off in 1757 and does not cover the Revolutionary period.
The Autobiography established the template for the American self-improvement narrative: the story of a man who rises from poverty and obscurity through industry, education, and moral discipline. Franklin’s famous project of “arriving at moral perfection” — in which he charts thirteen virtues and tracks his progress weekly — is at once earnest and self-ironising, and it established the genre of the self-help book two centuries before Dale Carnegie.
The book has been attacked — most famously by D. H. Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) — for promoting a reductive, acquisitive, bourgeois morality. Lawrence saw Franklin as the archetypal American: practical, utilitarian, and spiritually impoverished. But the Autobiography is more complex and more humorous than Lawrence allowed, and its influence on American literature and culture is immeasurable.
Poor Richard’s Almanack (1732–1758)
Franklin published the almanac annually for twenty-six years under the persona of “Poor Richard Saunders.” It was the most popular publication in the colonies after the Bible, selling about 10,000 copies per year. The almanac contained weather forecasts, astronomical data, poems, and — most memorably — the proverbs and aphorisms that Franklin either invented or adapted from earlier sources and that became the common currency of American folk wisdom.
The Way to Wealth (1758) — a preface to the final edition of the almanac — collected the best proverbs into a single narrative and became Franklin’s most widely reprinted work.
Other Writing
Franklin was a prolific essayist, satirist, and correspondent. His Silence Dogood letters (1722, published anonymously when he was sixteen), his scientific papers, his satirical pieces (including “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One,” 1773), and his vast correspondence constitute a body of writing remarkable for its clarity, wit, and practical intelligence.
His Experiments and Observations on Electricity (1751), published in London, established his international scientific reputation. His political satires — “An Edict by the King of Prussia” (1773), “The Sale of the Hessians” (1777) — are masterpieces of ironic argument. His “Bagatelles” — light essays written during his years in Paris, including the famous “Dialogue Between Franklin and the Gout” — reveal a playfulness and charm that Franklin’s reputation for utilitarian earnestness often obscures.
Franklin in France
Franklin’s years as American minister to France (1778–1785) were the culmination of his public life. He arrived in Paris at seventy, already the most famous American in the world, and became the most celebrated foreigner in the French capital. His image appeared on snuffboxes, medallions, prints, and chamber pots. He cultivated the persona of the rustic philosopher — wearing a fur cap instead of a wig, affecting a simplicity that enchanted the French court — and negotiated the alliance with France that proved decisive in the American Revolution. His friendships with Voltaire, Lavoisier, and the philosophes made him the living embodiment of the Enlightenment’s ideal of the practical intellectual.
His diplomatic achievement was extraordinary: he persuaded an absolute monarchy to bankroll a republican revolution, secured military support that turned the war, and negotiated the Treaty of Paris (1783) that ended it. John Adams, who served alongside him and resented his celebrity, grudgingly acknowledged that Franklin’s reputation was “more universal than that of Leibnitz or Newton, Frederick or Voltaire.”
Collecting Franklin
Original editions of Poor Richard’s Almanack are among the most valuable items in American book collecting, bringing $5,000–$50,000 depending on year and condition. The Autobiography in early editions (the 1793 French edition, the 1818 English edition) brings $1,000–$10,000. Franklin’s letters and autograph documents are collected at the highest level of the market.