A Benjamin Franklin Reader Read Free

circulation: gossip, sex, crime and humor. But he also used his pen to encourage worthy civic endeavors and, later, to push his political views. His Poor Richard’s almanacs combined humor and his penchant for self-improvement to become far and away the best-selling books of the era. And he used his talent to create a great media empire that included franchised print shops and newspapers throughout the colonies and then a distribution system, the colonial postal service, that tied them all together and helped give an advantage to his own content.
    His output was wondrously diverse and prolific. He wrote pointed tales and humorous hoaxes, amusing essays, letters both chatty and sophisticated, scientific treatises, detailed charters for civic associations, political tracts, plans for uniting the colonies, propaganda pieces supporting the American cause in Britain and then France, and bagatelles to his French female friends. All together his writings fill what will be forty-two volumes, each averaging about seven hundred pages, of which thirty-seven have already been published by the masterly editors of his papers at Yale University.
    In this book, I have assembled some of his most revealing, amusing and significant works. I tried to pick those that gave the best insight into Franklin’s personality and into his influence on the American character. I also chose a few of them, I must admit, simply because I found them delightful, and I want to convey what a fun (although complex) person Franklin was.
    I have presented the pieces chronologically, for the most part, because they thus provide an insight into the evolution of his own life and thinking. To put them in context, they are accompanied by short introductions or explanations that draw from the biography I wrote, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. One exception to the chronological order is the Autobiography. He wrote it in four installments, beginning in 1771 and ending in 1789 a year before his death, and I have included it all as one coherent narrative, as he intended, at the end of this volume.
    Franklin’s writings likewise flow together to give a narrative of both his own pilgrim’s progress and that of the new nation he helped to shape. He was the greatest inventor of his time, but the most interesting thing that he invented, and continually reinvented, was himself. America’s first great publicist, he was, in his life and in his writings, consciously trying to create a new American archetype. In the process, he carefully crafted his own persona, portrayed it in public, and polished it for posterity.
    Partly it was a matter of image. As a young printer in Philadelphia, he carted rolls of paper through the streets to give the appearance of being industrious. As an old diplomat in France, he wore a fur cap to portray the role of backwoods sage. In between, he created an image for himself as a simple yet striving tradesman, assiduously honing the virtues—diligence, frugality, honesty—of a good shopkeeper and beneficent member of his community.
    But the image he created was rooted in truth. Born and bred a member of the leather-aproned class, Franklin was, at least for most of his life, more comfortable with artisans and thinkers than with the established elite, and he was allergic to the pomp and perks of a hereditary aristocracy. Throughout his life he would refer to himself, first and foremost, as a printer and writer. And it was through these crafts that he was able to influence, more than any of the other Founders, the character and personality of the American nation.

Part 1
The Young Apprentice

Silence Dogood Introduces Herself
    Benjamin Franklin did not like being apprenticed to his older brother. “I fancy his harsh and tyrannical treatment of me,” Franklin later speculated, had the affect of “impressing me with that aversion to arbitrary power that has stuck to me through my whole life.” That was a bit unfair to poor James, whose newspaper in