Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin ran away from his brother’s Boston print shop at seventeen, made a fortune in Philadelphia as a printer and the author of Poor Richard’s Almanack, retired at forty-two to science, and proved that lightning is electricity. He founded a library, a fire company, a hospital, a university and the American Philosophical Society, represented the colonies in London, helped draft the Declaration, negotiated the French alliance and the peace, and signed the Constitution at eighty-one. The Autobiography, written for his son and left unfinished, is the story of the self-made man told by the man who made the type.