Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism (Norton Critical Edition). This item is unavailable.Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism (Norton Critical Edition)

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.