The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
A printer's apprentice in Boston runs away to Philadelphia, teaches himself to write, and ends up negotiating with France. Franklin wrote the book for his son and never finished it, so it stops before the Revolution and leaves the most famous part of his life out.
What remains is the most practical self-help book ever written by a founding father: a list of virtues, a schedule, a method for correcting faults. It is also a carefully constructed performance. Franklin is funny about his own failures, which makes the moral programme easier to take and harder to see through.
Public-domain status
First published in 1791. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Benjamin Franklin died in 1790, so this work has been free to republish there since 1861.
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