Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography (Norton Critical Editions)
Benjamin Franklin was a writer, inventor, political theorist, diplomat, and Founding Father of the United States. He wrote under the pen name of Poor Richard from 1732 to 1757.J.A. Leo Lemay is H. F. du Pont Winterthur Professor of English at the University of Delaware. His publications include Men of Letters in Colonial Maryland, A Calendar of American Poetry in the Colonial Newspapers and Magazines, and The Frontiersman from Lout to Hero. He has just completed New England’s Annoyances: America’s First Folk Song and is writing a book on the creation of American humor, 1607–1800.P.M. Zall, Professor of English and American Studies, California State University, Los Angeles, has edited Nathaniel Ward’s Simple Cobler of Aggawam in America, Comical Spirit of Seventy-Six: The Humor of Francis Hopkinson, Ben Franklin Laughing: Anecdotes from Original Sources by and about Ben Franklin, and most recently, Abe Lincoln Laughing. He is compiling a bibliography of English and American jestbooks.