| Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, typical of an Enlightenment man, illustrates the common intellectual and existential climate of the age. To the vision of the New World, still nebulous in the minds of many European contemporaries, Franklin, the product and the maker of his age, responded with a perfectly articulated representation of what America was like and what it meant to be an American at the time. As the autobiography of one of the Founding Fathers of America, Franklin's memoir prefaces the history of an autonomous and self-determining subject, characterized by independence, authority, and reason, while picturing America's pre-Revolutionary era. The unfinished autobiographical project appears as a testimony of a person of eighteenth-century America, who emerges as a progressive personality of the Enlightenment. This essay will analyze Franklin as a quintessential American who embodied virtues that became manifest symbols of the Republic. |