Description
Book SynopsisThe authoritative edition of Franklin's autobiography, now with a new foreword by the eminent Franklin scholar Edmund S. Morgan
Trade Review“People who have read one or more of the many current books about Benjamin Franklin really ought to direct their attention to the man himself, specifically to
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. . . . It is the first great American book. . . . An extraordinary document. . . . Plainly yet vividly written, its 18th-century prose still accessible to ordinary readers more than two centuries later. . . . It portrays Colonial and Revolutionary America . . . with an immediacy unmatched in almost any other document. . . . Franklin’s wisdom is for the ages, our own as much as his. So read the
Autobiography and—among the many editions available—read Yale’s. Its text is the most reliable (the Franklin papers are at Yale) and its supplementary material is uniformly useful.”—Jonathan Yardley,
Washington Post“The best and most beautiful edition [of the
Autobiography].”—J. H. Plumb,
New York Review of Books“Where so many fancy books are long on pictures and short on readable reading matter, this one is superbly the reverse. . . . What counts here is the text: the first thoroughly edited and adequately annotated version of Franklin’s memoirs faithful in every word to Franklin’s holograph. . . . The result is like cleaning away the grime and crackled varnish of generations to discover unsuspected sparkle in an old master.”—
Time
