The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Franklin wrote the autobiography in four parts between 1771 and 1790 and never finished it, so it covers his life only to 1757 and omits the Revolution, the French mission and the Constitutional Convention. The first part was written as a letter to his son William, and the tone shifts across the sections.

The narrative covers the Boston apprenticeship under his brother James, the flight to Philadelphia, the printing business, the Junto discussion club, the founding of the subscription library, the fire company, the American Philosophical Society and the academy that became the University of Pennsylvania, Poor Richard's Almanack, and the electricity experiments.

The most discussed section is the project of moral perfection, in which Franklin lists thirteen virtues, works on one per week in rotation, and tracks failures on a chart. He reports that he never achieved the standard but that the attempt made him better than he would otherwise have been, and he notes with characteristic self-awareness that he added humility to the list on a friend's advice and never mastered it.

The business material is instructive. Franklin describes cultivating the appearance of industry deliberately, avoiding public disputation because it makes enemies and rarely persuades, and the practice of proposing ideas as suggestions from others to reduce resistance. The text is eighteenth-century prose and requires adjustment. Franklin is selective about his own conduct and omits a great deal, including his treatment of his family and his early ownership of slaves. It is a construction of a public self as much as a record. Its influence on American self-improvement writing is direct and traceable through to the present.