In the Library
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin, 1791
- Form
- Form Essay
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 4.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 19
- Length
- Length 61k words
£1.99
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Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day.
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Up from Slavery
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About the book
A runaway apprentice walks up Market Street in Philadelphia at sixteen, three puffy rolls under his arms, his pockets stuffed with shirts and stockings, a girl on a doorstep laughing at him as he passes. Benjamin Franklin began composing his life in 1771 at his friend Bishop Shipley's English estate, set it aside for politics and revolution, and returned to it over fifteen years, leaving it unfinished at his death in 1790. He charts the thirteen virtues he tried to practice each week, the printing-house he built from borrowed type, the swim from Chelsea to Blackfriars, the kite, the stove, the lightning rod. The prose is plain, ironic, calibrated for a son and then for the republic. It is the founding American book about self-invention.