The Unfinished Life of Benjamin Franklin

by Douglas Anderson

Benjamin Franklin wrote his posthumously published memoir―a model of the genre―in several pieces and in different temporal and physical places. Douglas Anderson’s study of this work reveals the famed inventor as a literary adept whose approach to autobiographical narrative was as innovative and radical as the inventions and political thought for which he is renowned. Franklin never completed his autobiography, choosing instead to immerse his reader in the formal and textual atmosphere of a deliberately “unfinished” life. Taking this decision on Franklin’s part as a starting point, Anderson treats the memoir as a subtle and rewarding reading lesson, independent of the famous life that it dramatizes but closely linked to the work of predecessors and successors like John Bunyan and Alexis de Tocqueville, whose books help illuminate Franklin’s complex imagination. Anderson shows that Franklin’s incomplete story exploits the disorderly and disruptive state of a lived life, as opposed to striving for the meticulous finish of standard memoirs, biographies, and histories. In presenting Franklin’s autobiography as an exemplary formal experiment in an era that its author once called the Age of Experiments, The Unfinished Life of Benjamin Franklin veers away from the familiar practices of traditional biographers, viewing history through the lens of literary imagination rather than the other way around. Anderson’s carefully considered work makes a persuasive case for revisiting this celebrated book with a keener appreciation for the subtlety and beauty of Franklin’s performance.

228 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Carl Rollyson · Rating 5 out of 5]

In spite of the voluminous literature about Benjamin Franklin, this monograph deserves a special place on
any library's shelf. As Douglas Anderson notes, nearly all historians and biographers have mined
Franklin's autobiography for evidence of his life and the world that he did so much to shape. Literary
scholars have certainly explored the art Franklin employed in composing his incomplete autobiography. But
Anderson proposes to do something different: Treat the memoir exactly as what Franklin says it is, which
means as his story. Why did Franklin forsake chronology and turn to an episodic structure? What state
was the manuscript in when Franklin died? And how did subsequent publishers present it to the public? To
what in the book can we attribute to accident and what to design (the subject of Anderson's first chapter).
Franklin was a master at segmenting and re-distributing his experience in different formats, Anderson
points out, and Franklin's autobiography is very much a part of that digressive practice. This study
provides an illuminating insight into the ways publishers and editors partly determine a book's structure and fate.