Style. Style is the manner in which something is said or written. Any recurring feature, such as the selection of words and grammatical structures, that distinguishes one writer’s work from another can be said to be part of that writer’s style. An interesting stylistic characteristic in Franklin’s Autobiography is its egotism (or, more sympathetically, enlightened self-interest tempered by a willingness to question his own actions). As you read, look for this characteristic.
Autobiography. An autobiography is the story of a person’s life, written by that person. In this selection from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, the author describes the time in his youth when he established himself as a writer and printer. Create a chart, listing, on the left, facts about Franklin’s life while he was an apprentice for his brother, James. On the right, explain what you learned about Franklin’s character from these facts.
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Benjamin Franklin wrote The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin over a period of twenty years. It covers his life only until 1758, before his career as a diplomat. He began writing in 1771 and wrote the last two sections between 1788 and 1790, when illness forced him to put the work aside. Although the first part of the book was published in 1791, the entire work was not published until 1868.
Franklin’s writing style was developed, he noted, by imitation of great models, primarily of such Neoclassical masters as Joseph Addison. The Neoclassicists of the eighteenth century valued reason and sought to discover orderly principles, or natural laws, by which the life of an individual or of a nation could be conducted in order to achieve relative harmony and tranquility. For more information on Neoclassicism, see the introduction to this unit and the entry on Neoclassicism in the Handbook of Literary Terms.
What have you done to reach a personal goal?
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