The Select Works of Benjamin Franklin
Including His Autobiography; With Notes and a Memoir (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Select Works of Benjamin Franklin: Including His Autobiography; With Notes and a Memoir<br><br>Franklin's personal celebrity has so eclipsed his literary fame, that justice has hardly been done to him as a writer and an essayist; and yet he has himself confessed that he was indebted mainly to his pen for his advancement in public life. He was singularly indifferent, however, to any reputation or profit that might accrue from his writings, and left it to his friends to collect and republish them as they might please. The consequences of this indifference are manifest even to the present time, in the absence of any cheap popular edition of his select works. He has been posthumously fortunate, however, in having so able an editor as Mr. Sparks, whose ten volumes of the Works of Franklin, with a memoir and notes, leave nothing to be desired in the way of an ample and accurate collection.<br><br>But Franklin's is a name so eminently and intimately popular, that the want of a collection of his best works, more generally accessible in respect to size and cost, has long been experienced; and to supply this want the present edition is offered.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.