He had the ink of revolution in his veins. Breaking free of protocol and decorum, his Autobiography became the inimitable personal statement of a patriot who had long subordinated himself to a struggle for political and national liberty.Ī printer by profession, Franklin was also a newspaper proprietor and a publisher. In the making of the American republic, Franklin had a hand in three crucial founding documents: the Declaration of Independence, the wartime alliance with France and the peace treaty with the Britain of George III. His Autobiography was the culmination of a life devoted to the break with a colonial “tyranny”.

Long before his Autobiography he had become famous for his Almanack (published under the pseudonym “Poor Richard”), and its pithy sayings: “Fish and visitors stink in three days” “No gains without pains” “Make haste slowly” and, most ironic and American, “God helps those who help themselves”. In other manifestations, it surfaces again in the lives and careers of US presidents such as Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan.įranklin was a man always boiling over with ideas and opinions, a man of print and paper. His can-do enthusiasm and practical, folksy approach to the issues of the day is – dare one say? – quintessentially American. There’s also a revolutionary strand running through the text that makes it an ABC of democratic revolt as well as a canny self-portrait of a robust and rather enthralling radical, a lover of life, of women, and of simple pleasures, with an apparently uncomplicated delight in the world around him. The book itself is quite short, having been published in an abbreviated form after his death, but the tale it tells – a boy who makes his way in the world without connections, wealth or education, essentially living off his wits – is an archetypal portrait of “the founding fathers’ founding father”. His Autobiography is perhaps his finest creation, what the critic Jay Parini has called “a foundational book for Americans” that offers “a template for self-invention”. In all these guises (icon, innovator, self-advertiser), he is a true founding father, and 100% American. In life, he was a great inventor (of stoves, lightning rods and bifocals) in literature, a great self-inventor. B enjamin Franklin’s face – on banknotes, letterheads and civic documents – is an ageless icon of the American revolution, at once benign but cunning, projecting a mood that’s universal and accessible.

The autobiography of ben franklin