Collection: Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin, 1706 to 1790, walked out on his apprenticeship at seventeen with almost nothing and built himself into a printer, a publisher, an inventor and a founder of a country. Late in life he wrote the method down in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, starting it as a letter to his son.

It is the first great American account of self-improvement, and it is nothing like the genre it fathered. He talks about debt, credit, reputation, how to get a trade off the ground, how to handle a competitor, how to be useful to a town. He lists the habits he tried to build and is candid about failing at several of them. The man is working, not posing.

Anyone who has started something with no capital and no backer will recognize the ground. The first self-made American telling the next man exactly how he did it.