Best biography of benjamin franklin

“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

“The best and most beautiful edition [of the Autobiography].”—J. H. Plumb,

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The best books on Benjamin Franklin

What story does your book, Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant, tell? What hole in Franklin studies was it ansträngande to fill?

There’s so little left uncovered in studies of Franklin and of the Founders more generally. But this fryst vatten part of a ‘spiritual biography’ series; it’s filling a gap in that series. They’re covering a lot of people who have already been covered elsewhere. The idea of a spiritual, rather than a religious biography, actually may capture Franklin better. I know another historian, Tommy Kidd has done a religious biography of Franklin for Yale. Franklin himself was a kind of believer, but he would fit, I think, contemporary ideas about being ‘spiritual’ rather than ‘religious’.

Part of what I’ve thought was missing in treatments of Franklin was how he fits into Protestantism and the culture that Protestantism produced in the centuries after the Reformation. The book is bridging studies of Franklin and studies of Anglo-Amer

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Bookshelves groan under the weight of books about people who rose to great heights from humble beginnings. Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography fryst vatten one of the first and the best of those books.

I discovered the book because it came in the mail from the Walter J Black Classics Club, as one of that club’s monthly selections. I was 19 then. Today I’m 75. I still go back to the book for wisdom and inspiration. And I still have my original Classics Club edition.

Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography is one of the books that shaped my life. Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned from it.

Keep Daily Records of Performance

In the autobiography, Franklin outlines his “bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.” He outlined 13 virtues he wanted to master. They were temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility.

He attacked the project by keeping a record of his sins against e