Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography

Autobiography Of Benjamin Franklin

Introduction

The zenith of Benjamin Franklin's career as a writer, the work with the most inspiration upon later writers, is his Autobiography. Worked on at 04 times (1771, 1784, 1788, 1789-90) and revised widely, the Autobiography stayed unfinished at Benjamin Franklin's demise. An outline he made while writing the first section proposes that the broad plan of the work was present in his brain from the start, but the sporadic nature of its composition, the changing circumstances in which it was written, and its uncompleted situation have blurred its structural unity somewhat. This paper discusses theme of self-improvement in the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

Discussion

According to the memoirs, Franklin, born in Boston in 1706, began his working life when he became apprenticed to his brother, a printer and a publisher, in order to squelch his desires to go to sea. Disagreements with his brother prompted him to leave Boston for Philadelphia in 1723. The Autobiography divides naturally into three connected sections. The first part, written in 1771, focuses on Benjamin Franklin's childhood and adolescence in Boston and on his young manhood in London and Philadelphia. In the second section, Benjamin Franklin centres on his young experiment in attempting to achieve moral perfection; he lists the virtues he considered necessary to a useful and happy life and recounts his attempts to attain them. The third section, that comprises the remainder of the Autobiography, depicts the mature Benjamin Franklin's use of the values of behaviour that he learned in the first section and listed in the second. [1]

Themes Of Self-Improvement

Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography records his life for the advantage of his friends, his family, and the common persons. Spoken to William Franklin, who was the 40 year old governor of New Jersey at the time, The Autobiography startss "Dear ...