Franklin, Benjamin

Franklin, Benjamin (1706–90), born in Boston, Massachusetts, was largely self-educated. After working in a London printing house, 1724–5, he returned to Philadelphia and set up his own press, from which he issued the Pennsylvania Gazette. He acquired a wide reputation by his occasional writings, especially Poor Richard's Almanack (1733–58), and was active as a public figure, founding the American Philosophical Society and the academy that became the University of Pennsylvania. In 1757 he travelled to England as agent for the colonies, where he mixed widely in intellectual society (his friends including Burke, Hume, Adam Smith, William Strahan, and J. Priestley) and contributed greatly to the controversies that caused the breach with England; he returned home in 1774 and, after helping to draft the Declaration of Independence, travelled to France as ambassador. Upon his return in 1785 he signed the Constitution as a member of the Federal Constitutional Convention. His Autobiography was published in England in 1793 (translated from the French), in America in 1818. Franklin's prose was much admired in England. Lecky (History of England in the Eighteenth Century) described it as ‘always terse, luminous, simple, pregnant with meaning, eminently persuasive’.