Autobiography: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism (Norton Critical Editions)

by Benjamin Franklin (Author), J.A.LeoLemay (Author), P.M.Zall (Author)

New
Paperback
1986
$12.19

The text is fully annotated, and the reading is assisted by helpful footnotes, biographical sketches, and two maps In Backgrounds, the editors collect Franklin's most important reflections on theAutobiography's purpose, some anecdotes, and a number of Franklin's statements on wealth, the art of virtue, and perfection. Materials in Criticism range from contemporary opinions--which reveal that readers were divided then as they are now about the art of the Autobiography--to essays written in the twentieth century. Nineteenth-century opinions include those of John Keats, Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain, and William Dean Howells, among others The twentieth-century materials include D. H. Lawrence's celebrated essay, an excerpt from Max Weber'sProtestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and the perspectives of such recent critics as Charles L. Sanford, Robert Freeman Sayre, John William Ward, and David Devin.

Synopsis

The text is fully annotated, and the reading is assisted by helpful footnotes, biographical sketches, and two maps In Backgrounds, the editors collect Franklin's most important reflections on theAutobiography's purpose, some anecdotes, and a number of Franklin's statements on wealth, the art of virtue, and perfection. Materials in Criticism range from contemporary opinions--which reveal that readers were divided then as they are now about the art of the Autobiography--to essays written in the twentieth century. Nineteenth-century opinions include those of John Keats, Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain, and William Dean Howells, among others The twentieth-century materials include D. H. Lawrence's celebrated essay, an excerpt from Max Weber'sProtestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and the perspectives of such recent critics as Charles L. Sanford, Robert Freeman Sayre, John William Ward, and David Devin.

$12.19

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 416
Edition: annotated edition
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co.
Published: 19 Mar 1986
ISBN 10: 0393952940
ISBN 13: 9780393952940

Author Bio

Benjamin Franklin was a writer, inventor, political theorist, diplomat, and Founding Father of the United States. He wrote under the pen name of Poor Richard from 1732 to 1757. J.A. Leo Lemay is H. F. du Pont Winterthur Professor of English at the University of Delaware. His publications include Men of Letters in Colonial Maryland, A Calendar of American Poetry in the Colonial Newspapers and Magazines, and The Frontiersman from Lout to Hero. He has just completed New England's Annoyances: America's First Folk Song and is writing a book on the creation of American humor, 1607-1800. P.M. Zall, Professor of English and American Studies, California State University, Los Angeles, has edited Nathaniel Ward's Simple Cobler of Aggawam in America, Comical Spirit of Seventy-Six: The Humor of Francis Hopkinson, Ben Franklin Laughing: Anecdotes from Original Sources by and about Ben Franklin, and most recently, Abe Lincoln Laughing. He is compiling a bibliography of English and American jestbooks.