Introduction:
This version of the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin was part of The
Harvard Classics edition published by G. P. Putnam & Sons in 1909. The
physical book also included the Journal of John Woolman and Fruits of
Solitude by William Penn. This document only contains the Autobiography
of Benjamin Franklin. A scanned version of the physical book owned by
the Library of Congress is available through Hathitrust.
Scores of different editions of Franklin's Autobiography exist. Project
Gutenberg has the Pine edition, published by Henry Holt and Company in
1916. Frank Woodworth Pine edited the Holt book and F. Boyd Smith
illustrated the edition. Also available through PG is the Eclectic
English Classics version published in 1910. All three editions of
Franklin's Autobiography in the PG collection are based on the Bigelow
edition. See the section About the Autobiography in the Introduction of
the Pine edition for more background about the Bigelow edition.
1. Pine edition (1916)
2. Eclectic English Classics (1910)
3. Harvard Classics Edition (1909)
We have retained the original punctuation and spelling in the book, but
there are a few exceptions. See the Detailed Notes Section of these
notes for a list of changes. There are many misspelled words in this
Autobiography, but we made three changes, which we believe were made by
the editor or publisher. After the three changes that we made, those
sentences match the same sentence from the other two transcriptions of
the book in Project Gutenberg. The Detailed Notes Section also includes
issues that have come up during transcription.
Production Notes Section:
This book contained no chapters and no table of contents.
The navigation tools on page 2 of this book were added by the
transcriber, in the hope of providing a better reading experience. The
four parts of this book correspond to the four parts of the
Autobiography described in Wikipedia. Luckily, those four parts were the
same breaks that Mr. Eliot added in The Harvard Classics Edition.
The quotations of On Franklin's Autobiography were added by the
transcriber.