The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin began writing this account of his own life in 1771, addressing it initially to his son William, and returned to it in three further sittings before his death in 1790. He never finished it: the narrative breaks off in 1757, when Franklin was 51, leaving his later career as a scientist, diplomat, and Founding Father entirely outside its scope.

What survives covers Franklin's Boston childhood, his difficult apprenticeship to his brother James in the printing trade, his flight to Philadelphia at seventeen, and his methodical rise there as a printer, publisher, and civic organizer — founding a library, a fire company, and what became the University of Pennsylvania. A well-known section describes his self-devised program of moral self-improvement, in which he tracked his adherence to thirteen virtues in a daily chart.

Franklin's tone throughout is plain, practical, and often wry about his own younger ambitions and mistakes. Because the manuscript was never revised into a finished whole, and its first editions after his death were flawed translations and abridgments, its exact text has a complicated history — but the work has remained one of the most widely read American autobiographies, valued for its portrait of self-made industry and its firsthand view of colonial life.