The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

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. . . . Franklins wisdom is for the ages, our own as much as his. So read the Autobiography andamong the many editions availableread Yales. 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 Franklins memoirs faithful in every word to Franklins holograph. . . . The result is like cleaning away the grime and crackled varnish of generations to discover unsuspected sparkle in an old master.Time

Edmund S. Morgan (19162013) was Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University. He wrote more than a dozen books including Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America, which won the Bancroft Prize, and American Slavery, American Freedom, which won the Francis Parkman Prize and the Albert J. Beveridge Award. He also is the author of the New York Times best-selling biography Benjamin Franklin. Cited as one of Americas most distinguished historians, Morgan was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2000; in 2006, he received a special Pulitzer Prize for a creative and deeply influential body of work as an American historian that spans the last half century.