He starts with anecdotes about his grandfather, uncles, father, and mother. While in England at the estate of the Bishop of St Asaph in Twyford, Franklin, now 65 years old, begins by saying that it may be agreeable to his son to know some of the incidents of his father's life so with a week's uninterrupted leisure, he is beginning to write them down for William. Part One of the Autobiography is addressed to Franklin's son William, at that time (1771) Royal Governor of New Jersey. Pine wrote that Franklin's biography provided the "most remarkable of all the remarkable histories of our self-made men" with Franklin as the greatest exemplar. In the "Introduction" of the 1916 publication of the Autobiography, editor F. There are actual breaks between the first three parts of the narrative, but Part Three's narrative continues into Part Four without an authorial break. Although it had a tortuous publication history after Franklin's death, this work has become one of the most famous and influential examples of an autobiography ever written.įranklin's account of his life is divided into four parts, reflecting the different periods during which he wrote them. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is the traditional name for the unfinished record of his own life written by Benjamin Franklin from 1771 to 1790 however, Franklin appears to have called the work his Memoirs.
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