Book Bearings
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
- 214 pages · about 4 hours
- First published 1791
- 679 editions
- Free to read
Bookshop.org links may earn us a commission. It supports independent bookstores and costs you nothing.
1 About this book
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is the unfinished account of his own life that Franklin wrote in four stretches between 1771 and 1790, and which he seems to have called his Memoirs. It begins as an address to his son and tells of his boyhood, his apprenticeship as a printer, and his rise in Philadelphia as a printer, writer and public man, with his plans for his own moral improvement and his many civic and scientific projects. The story breaks off with the events of 1758, when he was fifty-two, long before the American Revolution.
- Politics and government
- History
- Biography
- Statesmen, biography
- Scientists, biography
- United states, biography
- Biography & autobiography
- Historical
2 What to expect
The unfinished memoir of one of America's founders, covering roughly his first fifty years: a printer's apprentice who becomes a leading citizen of Philadelphia, an organizer of public projects and a scientist. It is known for its practical advice on industry, thrift and self-improvement, told with dry humor and some vanity. The eighteenth-century prose is plain and readable, the structure is patchy, and it stops well before the Revolution.
Good for readers who want: a classic American memoir, self-improvement, and life in colonial America.
3 Read it free, right here
A free scan from the Internet Archive opens right here on the page, with no sign-up.
Read it on the Internet Archive4 About Benjamin Franklin
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
5 Similar books
- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet A. Jacobs
- Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow
- Michelle Obama in Her Own Words by Michelle Obama
- Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
- My year in Iraq by L. Paul Bremer
- The autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt by Theodore Roosevelt
- The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
- An Autobiography by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi