Benjamin Franklin
Author biography. Trumpet Publishing House Authors Directory.
Who he was
Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston on January 17, 1706, the fifteenth child of a candle and soap maker, and died in Philadelphia on April 17, 1790. He had two years of formal schooling.
Apprenticed to his elder brother as a printer, he broke the indenture and ran at seventeen, arriving in Philadelphia with almost nothing. He built a printing house, a newspaper, Poor Richard's Almanack, the first subscription library in America, a fire company, and a university. He proved lightning was electrical. He invented a stove, bifocals, and a flexible catheter for his sick brother, and patented none of it. He was postmaster, diplomat in London and Paris, and the only man to sign the Declaration of Independence, the treaty with France, the peace with Britain, and the Constitution.
Why he wrote it
He began the Autobiography in 1771 as a letter to his son William, then the royal governor of New Jersey. He added to it in three further stints across nineteen years and never finished it. It stops around 1757, well before the Revolution.
The gap between the warm opening letter and what followed is worth knowing. William stayed loyal to the Crown. The two men ended the war on opposite sides and never properly reconciled. The book is addressed to a son its author effectively lost.
The book we publish, and why
We publish the Autobiography unabridged because it is the founding document of American self-improvement and almost nothing like the genre it fathered.
There is no mysticism in it and no affirmation. He talks about debt, credit, pricing, how to get a trade off the ground, how to handle a competitor, how to be useful enough that a town cannot do without you. He lists the thirteen virtues he tried to build by deliberate practice, with a chart, and he is candid that he failed at order his entire life and gave up on it.
The benefit is a method. A reader gets the first self-made American explaining exactly how he did it, including the parts that did not work.
How to read it
Read it as four sittings rather than one book, because that is what it is. The voice changes between them: the first part is a relaxed father writing to his son, the later parts are an old statesman conscious of an audience. The first is the best.
The thirteen virtues and the chart are the famous part, and the temptation is to skip to them. Resist it for one reading. They mean little without the forty pages of hard, practical trade-building that precede them.
Read him skeptically. He is managing his own reputation on the page, and he is very good at it. Noticing where he is doing that is half the education.
Pair it with
- Plutarch, Parallel Lives. Franklin read him young and said so. Plutarch teaches you to read character; Franklin is a man deliberately constructing one.
- Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics. The thirteen virtues are Aristotle's argument that character is built by repeated acts, turned into a weekly checklist by a printer.
- Baltasar Gracián, for the European version of the same skills, learned at court rather than in a print shop.
His principal works
He wrote constantly, much of it anonymously or under invented names.
- The Silence Dogood letters, 1722. Written at sixteen under a widow's name and slipped under his brother's door.
- A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain, 1725. An early philosophical pamphlet he later regretted.
- Poor Richard's Almanack, 1732 to 1758. Annual, and the source of most of the proverbs attached to his name.
- The Way to Wealth, 1758. The Almanack's maxims gathered into one address.
- Experiments and Observations on Electricity, 1751 onward. The work that made his scientific reputation in Europe.
- Political pamphlets, including Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One, 1773.
- The Bagatelles, 1770s and 1780s. Light pieces written in France, including The Whistle and the Dialogue with the Gout.
- The Autobiography, written 1771 to 1790, published after his death and unfinished.
General reference on Benjamin Franklin. External links open outside Trumpet Publishing House.
Our editions
This collection grows as further editions and formats are added, so it is worth returning to.
All Trumpet editions by Benjamin Franklin