THE ARTICLE · 6 MIN
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is the unfinished story of how a Boston candle-maker’s son became a printer, writer, scientist and public figure, told in his own words. Here are its big ideas in our own words, what the book says about his famous virtue chart and how it turned out, which sayings credited to him are his, and a few small practices drawn from the parts that hold up.
About the book
Franklin was born in Boston in 1706 and died in Philadelphia in 1790. He wrote the memoir in four parts. The first, headed “Twyford, at the Bishop of St. Asaph’s, 1771”, is a letter to his son; the second was written at Passy, near Paris, in 1784; the third opens with a note, “I am now about to write at home, August, 1788”; the last few pages date from the final months of his life. The Library of Congress notes that before the 1840s it was known as his Life or Memoirs, and that it was printed piecemeal (magazine extracts in 1790, a French book in 1791) until John Bigelow’s edition of 1868 put all four parts together in English.
It is public domain, so we read all of it: the Harvard Classics text edited by Charles W. Eliot (1909), which reproduces Bigelow’s, in Project Gutenberg eBook #148. That is about 64,500 words of memoir. The Eliot edition heads it “1706-1757”: the story reaches his arrival in London in July 1757 and the dispute he went there to argue, then breaks off.
The big ideas
1. Life as a book with errata
Franklin borrows a printer’s word for his mistakes. Breaking his apprenticeship early, spending money he had been asked to collect and keep for another man, and neglecting his promises to Deborah Read while in London are each called an “erratum”. He says he would happily live the same life again, “only asking the advantages authors have in a second edition to correct some faults of the first.”
2. Teach yourself by copying, then checking
As a young apprentice he trained his writing on The Spectator: he jotted short hints of each sentence, waited a few days, rewrote the essay from the hints, then “compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.” When he tried a vegetarian diet after reading a book that recommended it, he found it also saved half his board money for books.
3. Virtue as a habit project
Once settled in business, by his account, he began “the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection” and found that good intentions were not enough: “the contrary habits must be broken, and good ones acquired and established”. So he chose 13 virtues, wrote a short precept for each and kept the chart described in the rows above.
4. Persuade quietly
He dropped words like “certainly” and “undoubtedly” in favour of “I conceive” and “it so appears to me at present”, and says his opinions then met “a readier reception and less contradiction”. When raising money for public projects he kept his own name in the background and presented the scheme as coming from “a number of friends”.
5. Clubs that became institutions
A Friday-evening discussion club, the Junto, which he calls “a club of mutual improvement”, was the starting point for a subscription library (fifty members at “forty shillings each, and ten shillings per annum”) and a volunteer fire company, and its members helped him launch an academy that grew into the University of Pennsylvania. He also backed a hospital that was, he stresses, a friend’s idea. For the hospital he wrote a bill granting public money only if private donors raised a matching sum, so that “every man’s donation would be doubled”.
6. Small things, every day
“Human felicity is produc’d not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day,” he writes, in a passage about street sweeping. The book is full of this practical streak, from stove design to street lamps.
What holds up
The book’s own account can be checked against the text, and the rows above do that. Two points need more room.
The chart, and what research says about tracking
Franklin’s chart is a form of what psychologists call progress monitoring: writing down, each day, how you did. A 2016 meta-analysis found that, on average, getting people to monitor their progress helped them reach their goals, and that it helped more when they physically recorded it or reported it to others. His one-virtue-a-week timetable fits the research less well. In a 2010 study of people building one new daily habit, the time to reach 95% of their own plateau of automaticity ranged from 18 to 254 days. Franklin’s own report fits that picture: Order, he says, “cost me so much painful attention” that he nearly gave up on it.
What the book leaves out
The memoir breaks off in the late 1750s, so it covers none of his diplomacy or the American Revolution. It also says nothing about the people Franklin enslaved: in the Eliot text the word “slave” appears once, in a phrase about debt being “a species of slavery to his creditors”. The archive records in the rows above fill part of that gap.
How to use it
These practices come from the parts that hold up. They describe what people do; what fits your situation is your call.
- A one-page chart. Some people copy Franklin’s grid for a handful of behaviours and mark it each evening. The tracking research found that monitoring helped more when progress was physically recorded.
- One change at a time, with a longer clock. Franklin worked on one virtue at a time; the habit research suggests that weeks or months, not a single week, are a more realistic horizon.
- Keeping an errata list. Writing down mistakes and what you did to put them right, as he did, is one way to keep an honest record of your own progress.
- Asking for a small favour. His book-borrowing story has some support in one experiment, though the evidence is thin, so this is worth treating as a possibility rather than a technique.
Who it’s for, and who can skip it
It suits readers interested in self-improvement, history and early American life, and anyone curious about where many modern productivity ideas started. The prose is eighteenth-century and the third part is long on Pennsylvania politics. Some passages are hard to read today: describing a treaty meeting at Carlisle, Franklin calls the Native Americans present “savages” and suggests that rum may be the means of Providence to “extirpate” them, and he records a dinner-table joke about selling Black people. Readers can weigh those passages for themselves. Anyone short of time can read the second part, written at Passy, which holds the virtues and the chart.
If you liked this
- Atomic Habits, summarised: a modern book about building habits, checked against the research.
- Older Than You Think, Part 2: where “time is money”, “early to bed” and other productivity sayings come from.
- Self-Reliance, summarised: Emerson’s essay on trusting your own mind, which names Franklin among the people no master could have taught.
Sources
- Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Charles W. Eliot, Harvard Classics (1909), Project Gutenberg eBook #148.
- Library of Congress, “Franklin’s Autobiography”, Finding Benjamin Franklin: A Resource Guide.
- “Poor Richard, 1735”, Founders Online, National Archives (from The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 2).
- W. Carew Hazlitt, English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases (1907), citing John Clarke, Paroemiologia Anglo-Latina (1639).
- Quote Investigator: “Time is Money”, “Tell Me and I Forget; Teach Me and I May Remember; Involve Me and I Learn” and “Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again…”.
- Benjamin Harkin et al., “Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment?”, Psychological Bulletin 142(2), 198–229 (2016), abstract.
- Phillippa Lally et al., “How are habits formed”, European Journal of Social Psychology 40(6) (2010), abstract.
- Yuko Niiya, “Does a favor request increase liking toward the requester?”, Journal of Social Psychology 156(2), 211–221 (2016), abstract.
- University of Pennsylvania Archives, “Benjamin Franklin”.
- National Archives, Center for Legislative Archives, “Benjamin Franklin’s Anti-Slavery Petitions to Congress”.
Checked October 2026. What we read: the whole of the Autobiography in the Eliot edition (Project Gutenberg #148); the Library of Congress guide; the Poor Richard almanac for 1735 on Founders Online; Hazlitt’s entry; the three Quote Investigator articles; the abstracts of the Harkin, Lally and Niiya papers; and the University of Pennsylvania and National Archives pages.
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