Autobiographie

The life story of Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790), who became one of the most significant statesmen of the young United States, is considered the first classic work of American literature. Benjamin Franklin, the son of a soap maker and candle maker who emigrated to the New World, recounts in these memoirs his childhood and apprenticeship in puritanical Boston, the escape of the life-hungry bookworm to the cosmopolitan Philadelphia, and his successful endeavors there, first as a printer and later as a scientist and inventor. He describes his rise to become a respected citizen and politician. The autobiography of this worldly, pragmatic Enlightenment thinker and representative of the young American Republic, this tirelessly active citizen in various fields, is, as Hans J. Schütz writes, certainly one of the most significant autobiographical testimonies of an emancipated bourgeoisie.