The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin · 1793
5.0 · 6 ratings
About the book
The original American success story, told by the man himself: a runaway apprentice becomes printer, inventor and statesman, and stops mid-life to explain the method, thirteen virtues and all. Every self-improvement book since is a footnote to this one.
Try the short course
Part 1 · Three rolls on Market Street. The first six slides, free.
1 / 6
In 1771 Franklin was sixty-five, famous on both sides of the Atlantic, and staying at a bishop's country house in England with a rare week of quiet ahead of him. He sat down and began a letter: "Dear Son."
The letter says plainly what the book is for. He had climbed out of poverty and obscurity into comfort and some reputation, and he thought his descendants might want to know the means he had used. Some of them, he suspected, might suit their own situations and be worth imitating.
So read what follows as a manual disguised as a memoir. The stories are true, and they are chosen. Each one is there because it shows a method at work, or shows what his life looked like before he had one.
Inside the course
12 parts- A runaway apprentice arrives in Philadelphia with three rollsFree above
- The printing trade: learning by setting other men's type
- Errata — how Franklin accounts for his own mistakes
- The Junto: a club for mutual improvement
Questions
Is The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin free to read in Astra Trainer?
Yes. The full book opens free in the app’s reader, in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Russian.
What is the short course?
12 short parts that walk through the book’s key ideas in slides, each with a quick quiz. The first six slides are free to try on this page.
Where do I get the app?
Astra Trainer is free on the App Store and Google Play. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is waiting in the app’s library.
