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The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin was not only one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He was a leading writer, publisher, inventor, diplomat, scientist, and philosopher. He is well-known for his experiments with electricity and lightning, and for publishing "Poor Richard's Almanac" and the Pennsylvania Gazette. He served as Postmaster General under the Continental Congress, and later became a prominent abolitionist. He is credited with inventing the lightning rod, the Franklin Stove, and bifocals. A year after Benjamin Franklin's death, his autobiography, entitled "Memoires De La Vie Privee," was published in Paris in March of 1791. The first English translation, "The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin, LL.D. Originally Written By Himself, And Now Translated From The French," was published in London in 1793.

Known today as "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin," this classic piece of Americana was originally written for Franklin's son William, then the Governor of New Jersey.

The work portrays a fascinating picture of life in Philadelphia, as well as Franklin's shrewd observations on the literature, philosophy and religion of America's Colonial and Revolutionary periods. Franklin wrote the first five chapters of his autobiography in England in 1771, resumed again thirteen years later (1784-85) in Paris and later in 1788 when he returned to the United States. Franklin ends the account of his life in 1757 when he was 51 years old.

Considered to be the greatest autobiography produced in Colonial America, Franklin's Autobiography is published here in 14 chapters.

Read the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

http://www.earlyamerica.com/lives/franklin/


>>>>> My AutoBiography

What is biography?

In favor

Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
-- José Ortega Y Gasset
Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.
-- Benjamin Disraeli

Biographers, like actors, have to think their way into other people’s
minds and allow their own to be partially invaded by their subject’s.
-- Roger Berthoud

Then you take it all -- the chronology, the letters, the interviews, your
own knowledge, the newspaper cuttings, the history books, the diary,
the thousand hours of contemplation, and you try to make a whole of it,
not a chronicle but a drama, with a beginning and an end, the whole
being given form and integrity because a man moves through it from
birth to death, through all the beauty and terror of human life.
-- Alan Paton, on completing a biography.

The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent
and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn’t
discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life
that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless
happenings and gossip.
-- Leon Edel

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more
than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative
fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.
-- Virginia Woolf

[The biographer] must be as ruthless as a board meeting smelling out
embezzlement, as suspicious as a secret agent riding the Simplon-Orient
Express, as cold-eyed as a pawnbroker viewing a leaky concertina.
-- Paul Murray Kendall

Against

[Biography is] voyeurism embellished with footnotes.
-- Robert Skidelsky

Lincoln isn’t a man with ingrown toenails, he’s an idea.
-- Mario Cuomo, on a biography of Lincoln.

It is in this impossibility of attaining to a synthesis of the inner life
and the outward that the inferiority of the biographer to the novelist
lies. The biographer quite clearly sees Peel, say, seated on his bench
while his opponents overwhelm him with perhaps undeserved
censure. He sees him motionless, miserable, his head bent on his
breast. He asks himself: 'What is he thinking?' and he knows nothing.
-- Andre Maurois

Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history,
on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by
tedium.
-- Philip Guedalla

Let us have our heroes. Let us continue to believe that some have been
truly great; that it lies within human ability to overcome temptations
and trials; that it is sublime to suffer and be strong. Petty biographers
with inferior souls and jealous hearts would rob us of these happy privileges.
Sensationalism is alright for yellow journalism, but in biography we wish
to see our famous men and women as they were and feel the power of the
strength and beauty of their lives. Down with the debunking biographers.
-- Lyndon Johnson

The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures
but the story of his style.
-- Vladimir Nabokov

The cult of individuality and personality, which promotes
painters and poets only to promote itself, is really a business.
The greater the genius of the personage, the greater the profit.
--George Grosz

Resource: http://writing-program.uchicago.edu/biography/index.htm

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To know how create a blog see these power point shows.
First Create a Google account and the build your blogs,
if you have no Google account (Gmail account).
For Download the files choose SAVE AS TARGET by right
click on them.

Gmail & Google account

Create Your Google Account And gmail.pps (Powerpoint)

Create Your Google Account.zip (Picture)

Creating Weblog (part 1)

Create a blog part one.pps (Powerpoint)

Create a blog part one.zip (Picture)