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.
"The best and most beautiful edition [of the Autobiography]."
"People who have read one or more of the many current books about Benjamin Franklin really ought to direct their attention to the man himself, specifically to The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. . . . It is the first great American book. . . . An extraordinary document. . . . Plainly yet vividly written, its 18th-century prose still accessible to ordinary readers more than two centuries later. . . . It portrays Colonial and Revolutionary America . . . with an immediacy unmatched in almost any other document. . . . Franklin's wisdom is for the ages, our own as much as his. So read the 'Autobiography, ' and--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
"Where so many fancy books are long on pictures and short on readable reading matter, this one is superbly the reverse . . . what counts here is the text: the first thoroughly edited and adequately annotated version of Franklin's memoirs faithful in every word to Franklin's holograph. . . . The result is like cleaning away the grime and crackled varnish of generations to discover unsuspected sparkle in an old master."--
Time"The best and most beautiful edition [of the Autobiography]."--J. H. Plumb, New York Review of Books
"This is one of those rarest of historiographical achievements: a publication of the original text of a historical and literary classic in which the bookmaker's art and the historian's best technical editorial skill are combined to produce a work that is both a dependable scholar's source, a reader's delight, and a thing of beauty."--
American Historical Review
