Autobiography

by Benjamin Franklin

Franklin's Autobiography may be read as a preface to Horatio Alger and as an afterword to Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Franklin's account of his journey from Boston to Philadelphia, his account of experiences in London as a young man, and his establishment of himself, finally, after his return to America, as one of the first figures in the pre-Revolutionary colonies and later in the new republic, is an account of the development of a myth. It is also an account of the making of a persona known as Benjamin Franklin, who wrote an autobiography not least of all because others warned him of consequences which might accompany unauthorized accounts of his life.

197 pages

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