The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

In 1771 Franklin was sixty-five, famous on both sides of the Atlantic, and staying at a bishop's country house in England with a rare week of quiet ahead of him. He sat down and began a letter: "Dear Son."

The letter says plainly what the book is for. He had climbed out of poverty and obscurity into comfort and some reputation, and he thought his descendants might want to know the means he had used. Some of them, he suspected, might suit their own situations and be worth imitating.

So read what follows as a manual disguised as a memoir. The stories are true, and they are chosen. Each one is there because it shows a method at work, or shows what his life looked like before he had one.

There is a printer's joke tucked into the opening pages. If he were offered his whole life again from the beginning, Franklin says, he would take it, "only asking the advantages authors have in a second edition to correct some faults of the first."

He had spent his youth setting type and reading proofs. He knew every first edition goes out with mistakes, and that the honest fix is not to pretend otherwise but to correct them in the next printing.

Since nobody gets to live twice, he settles for the nearest thing: remembering the life and putting it in writing, where it will last. That makes the book a second edition of a life. He is not presenting a flawless man. He is presenting a text he has already proofread, with the faults marked.

According to his opening letter, why does Franklin sit down to write the story of his life?

• To answer the political enemies who had attacked his reputation
• To record his family's ancestry before his uncle's old notes are lost
• To confess his youthful sins and ask his son to forgive them
• To pass on the means he used, so descendants can copy what suits them✓Correct answer

He writes that the means that lifted him out of poverty might suit his descendants' own situations and be fit to be imitated. The family anecdotes are where he starts, not why he writes, and he treats his faults as things to correct rather than to confess.

Then Franklin does something most success stories never do: he admits the other reasons he is writing. Old men like talking about their past, he says, and on paper nobody is obliged to listen. And, since a denial would be believed by nobody, "perhaps I shall a good deal gratify my own vanity."

He adds a sly observation. Whenever he heard someone begin with "Without vanity I may say," some vain thing followed immediately. Instead of claiming to be above it, he defends vanity: it often does good to the vain person and to everyone around him, so a man might almost thank God for it among life's other comforts.

This matters for everything that follows. The story comes from someone who has openly confessed to enjoying the telling. That doesn't make him unreliable. It makes him easier to read, because you know where he is standing.

Franklin suggests that a man might reasonably thank God for his vanity, counting it among the comforts of life.

True✓Correct answer

That is his own position in the opening letter: vanity is often productive of good to its owner and to the people around him, so thanking God for it would not be altogether absurd. He says this while admitting the book will gratify his own.

The trouble began when Franklin, at twelve, was bound apprentice to his older brother James, a Boston printer. James was not ill-natured, Ben says, but free with his fists, and Ben admits he himself was probably "too saucy and provoking."

When the authorities barred James from printing his newspaper, the brothers kept it going under Ben's name. His old indenture was cancelled for show, and a new one was signed in private. After one more quarrel, Ben simply declared himself free, betting that James would never dare produce the secret papers. Franklin later calls this one of the first errata of his life.

James made sure no printer in Boston would hire him. So Ben sold some of his books for passage money and slipped aboard a sloop to New York: a boy of but 17, three hundred miles from home, with no introductions and very little money.