As author of one of the most famous autobiographies ever written and publisher of the Poor Richard almanacs, Benjamin Franklin holds forever a firm place in the hearts and minds of Americans (and, indeed, of all people) who honor good humor, common...

As author of one of the most famous autobiographies ever written and publisher of the Poor Richard almanacs, Benjamin Franklin holds forever a firm place in the hearts and minds of Americans (and, indeed, of all people) who honor good humor, common...

Irrepressibly inventive, gifted with a "marvellous range," Benjamin Franklin, an admiring biographer observed, was "a harmonious human multitude." To his contemporaries he seemed prodigious. To us, living in an age of occupational specialties, the...

Benjamin Franklin--printer, scientist, inventor, author, philosopher, and statesman--was also one of the great travelers of the eighteenth century. Living in Europe for more than a quarter of a century, first as a young entrepreneur, then in service to...

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was a leader of America's Revolutionary generation. His character and thought were shaped by a blending of Puritan heritage, Enlightenment philosophy, and the New World environment. Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston...

Rarely remembered as a magazinist, Benjamin Franklin throughout his life paid tribute to the print shop, which served first as his school-room and later as a pulpit for his ideas on government and the media. Although Franklin's direct contributions to...

Born on January 17, 1706, in the British colony of Boston, Massachusetts, Franklin was the fifteenth of seventeen children. His father was an impoverished candlemaker, unable to afford to send young Benjamin to school. As a result, he received only two...

Born on January 17, 1706, in the British colony of Boston, Massachusetts, Franklin was the fifteenth of 17 children. His father was an impoverished candlemaker, unable to afford to send young Benjamin to school. As a result, he received only two years...

Born in what was then the British colony of Boston, Massachusetts, on January 17, 1706, Franklin was the fifteenth of seventeen children and received only two years of a formal education. He started working in his father's candlemaking shop at the age...