Benjamin Franklin

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Name: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Author: Benjamin Franklin

Self-Help, Money and Success

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Language: English
First published: 1791
Reading time: 280 minutes
Chapters: 8 chapters

About this book

Benjamin Franklin began this book in 1771 as a long letter to his son and kept coming back to it until shortly before his death.

He tells how a candle-maker's son from Boston ran away to Philadelphia, built up a printing business and went on to start a library, a fire company and a college, experiment with electricity and serve his colony in London. Along the way he describes his famous plan to practise thirteen virtues, with a frank account of how often he failed. Full of humour and plain good sense, it is one of the first great American life stories. It breaks off in 1757.

Twyford, at the Bishop of St. Asaph's, 1771.

Part One, part 1 of 3

About this edition

Source
Project Gutenberg (eBook #148)
Text version
Project Gutenberg eBook #148 (updated 11 March 2024), downloaded 7 November 2026: the Harvard Classics edition (P. F. Collier & Son, 1909), which follows the text of Franklin's manuscript as published by John Bigelow in 1868. Only Franklin's own text is imported, including the letters from Abel James and Benjamin Vaughan that he copied into it and his own footnotes and marginal notes (shown as notes). Not imported: the title page, the editor's introductory note, the table of chief events in Franklin's life, and the footnotes and labels added by the editors (John Bigelow, William Temple Franklin and the Harvard Classics editor). The text has no chapters: the headings Part One to Part Four were added where Franklin took up the work again (1771, 1784, 1788 and 1789-90).
Category
Self-Help, Money and Success
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