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.