Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) was born in Boston. When he was twelve,
his father apprenticed him to his half brother James as a printer.
James was later the publisher of the New England Courant, where
Franklin's first articles, "The Dogood Papers," were published
before he was seventeen. He went to Philadelphia in 1723, where he
was befriended by William Keith, Governor of Pennsylvania, who
offered to help Franklin get started in business. They went to
England, where he hoped to purchase printing equipment, but he was
soon deserted by Keith and again turned to printing for a
livelihood. His privately printed "A Dissertation on Liberty and
Necessity, Pleasure and Pain" (1725) introduced him to leading
Deists and other intellectuals in London. A year later, he returned
to Philadelphia, and by 1730, he had been appointed public printer
for Pennsylvania. In 1731, he established the first circulation
library in the United States and, in 1743-44, the American
Philosophical Society. As a publisher, his greatest success was
Poor Richard's Almanack, which went through numerous editions and
was translated into many languages. Over the next thirty-five
years, he devoted himself largely to politics and diplomacy, by
serving in the Continental Congress, signing the Declaration of
Independence, and becoming Minister to France. On his return in
1785, he was elected President of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Still concerned with the rights of the individual, he published
papers encouraging the abolition of slavery. He died in
Philadelphia.
L. Jesse Lemisch is Professor Emeritus of History at the John Jay
College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York.
Among his notable works is The American Revolution Seen from the
Bottom Up.
Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, has been chairman
of CNN and the managing editor of Time. He is the author of Steve
Jobs; Einstein- His Life and Universe; Benjamin Franklin- An
American Life; and Kissinger- A Biography, and is the coauthor of
The Wise Men- Six Friends and the World They Made. He lives in
Washington, DC.
Carla Mulford has been teaching early American literature and
culture and Native American studies at Pennsylvania State
University, University Park, since 1986. The Founding President of
the Society of Early Americanists, she has published books related
to Franklin's associates and contemporaries John Leacock, Annis
Stockon, William Hill Brown, and Hannah Webster Foster. She has
also compiled (with Amy E. Winans and Angela Vietto) two
collections- a biographical dictionary, American Women Prose
Writers to 1820, and an anthology of readings, Early American
Writings. She has published several essays on Benjamin Franklin and
is working on two book-length studies of Franklin called Benjamin
Franklin and the Arts of Science and Benjamin Franklin and the Ends
of Empire.
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