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. . . . 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

“This is one of those rarest of historiographical achievements: a publication of the original text of a historical and literary classic in which the bookmaker’s art and the historian’s best technical editorial skill are combined to produce a work that is both a dependable scholar’s source, a reader’s delight, and a thing of beauty.”—American Historical Review