Written in a little over a week when the 65-year-old Franklin was taking a break from traveling the British Isles, collecting honors and trying to quell the growing hubbub between England and her colonies, the first of these sections would become the most famous part of the Autobiography. It provided the origin story of America’s most famous tradesman and how he emerged from the “Poverty & Obscurity” in which he was “born & bred.”

The story begins in Boston, familiarly enough, with an ambitious father who longed for a better life for his son. In this instance, that meant better than the putrid profession of a tallow chandler, the vocation to which Josiah Franklin had dedicated himself. Ben was the fifteenth of seventeen children and the youngest of Josiah’s boys. As such, the elder Franklin planned to offer him “as the tithe of his sons, to the service of the Church.”

A minister’s education proved too expensive, however, so Ben entered a stationer’s shop to learn a trade. He was only 12 years old, and if he felt newly enrolled in the school of hard knocks, it was because they were generously applied by his older brother James, the proprietor of the printing house where he apprenticed. Understandably, the two did not get along well, and James grew increasingly impatient with his brother, whose genius, by turns, enriched and embarrassed him. After five years and one last falling out, the younger Franklin ran away to Philadelphia, arriving after a perilous sea journey with only one “Dutch dollar, and about a shilling in copper.”

In Philadelphia, Franklin eventually became the proprietor of his own printing house, intent on securing his reputation as a tradesman. “I took care not only to be in Reality Industrious & frugal,” he says in perhaps the most telling passage of the Autobiography,

but to avoid all Appearances to the Contrary. I drest plainly; I was seen at no Places of idle Diversion; I never went out a-fishing or shooting; a Book, indeed, sometimes debauch’d me from my Work; but that was seldom, snug, & gave no Scandal: and to show that I was not above my Business, I sometimes brought home the Paper I purchas’d at the Stores, thro’ the Streets on a Wheelbarrow. Thus being esteem’d an industrious thriving young Man, and paying duly for what I bought, the Merchants who imported Stationary solicited my Custom, others propos’d supplying me with Books, & I went on swimmingly.

Franklin was just 22 and his greatest successes were all still before him, but as far as future generations would be concerned, the legend of the colonial upstart was largely complete.

* * *

When an ailing Franklin put down his quill once and for all sometime around Christmas of 1789, what he had accomplished only took readers through his early 50s. That meant the Autobiography was weighted toward his early years as a striving stationer, showcasing, as he explained to a friend, “the effects of prudent and imprudent conduct in the commencement of a life in business.”