The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 51 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 51 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.
This section contains 2,095 words
(approx. 6 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin Study Guide

In the following excerpt, Baker argues that the self-promotion of which many critics accuse Franklin is more of a paradigm for American prosperity.

After reading the first installment of Benjamin Franklin's memoirs, Benjamin Vaughan concluded that his friend's life story would offer a fitting paradigm of American upward social mobility. "All that has happened to you," he wrote to Franklin in 1783, is "connected with the detail of the manners and situation of a rising people." Vaughan's insistence that Franklin's was a prototypical story of success and self-making suggested that the memoir was representative of the American experience. While the limitations of this prototype are clear to the modern reader—Vaughan spoke specifically of a "rising people" of Euro-American males with access to economic opportunities not available to others—critics have recognized nonetheless a presumption of representativeness in this text. In the words of Mitchell Breitwieser, Franklin "aspires...

(read more)

This section contains 2,095 words
(approx. 6 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin Study Guide
Copyrights
BookRags
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin from BookRags. (c)2024 BookRags, Inc. All rights reserved.