Benjamin Franklin was born on January 17, 1706, in Boston. He was born into a family of seventeen children. His parents where Josiah and Abiah. His father Josiah was a candle and soap maker. His mother, as were most other mothers, was a common housewife. Franklin attended school for two years and at this point his father decided he could not afford to send him to school anymore. Despite this factor in 1724, Franklin became a master printer and owned his own printing press. With this press he produced one of the most poplar newspapers of the time. Later in life Ben married a lucky lady by the name of Deborah Read. Ben and Deborah had four children. There were two boys and two girls. One of the boys, William, became the governer of New Jersey. Throughout Franklin's life he had invented many handy gadgets. For instance he invented the bifocals, lightning rod, and an efficient heating stove. In 1747, Franklin discovered the first reliable means of storing energy in the form of a battery (Donovan, 62). At the age of forty-two Franklin retired but he didn't let this stop his winning streak. After retirement he seemed to most focuse on his inventions (Donovan, 72). On April 17, 1790 Benjamin Franklin passed away (Miles, 836). Mr. Franklin must have impressed somebody because there were and estimated twenty thousand people at his funeral, not to mention he is on the one hundred-dollar bill!.
It is the working through of this process that gives the "memoirs", which were begun as Franklin's report as a father to his son William and later readdressed to his "prosperity", their coherence and special meaning (Dawson, 1). Mr. Dawson belived Benjamin Franklin to be a very intelligent man. I belive Dawson really liked Franklin as an author. Thus the mythic pattern of the "memoirs" is cyclical; the Prodigal son who was lost has returned, but to explain theh lessons learned in making good. Readers have long recognized Franklin's sense that his personal history was the story of his people in microcosm (Dawson, 18).
