
Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography (First Edition)
Norton Critical Editions
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Narrated by:
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Don Gentry
About this listen
The only edition of the celebrated autobiography that includes the long-missing and recently identified "Wagon Letters".
Written during the most eventful years of Benjamin Franklin's life (1771-90), the autobiography is one of the most influential memoirs in history. This newly edited Norton Critical Edition includes an introduction that explains the history of the autobiography within the larger history of the life-writing genre as well as within the history of celebrity.
"Contexts" presents a broader view of Franklin's life with a journal entry from a 1726 voyage, correspondence, a Poor Richard piece on ambition and fame, Franklin's views on self-improvement, and his last will (and codicil).
"Criticism" draws on a wealth of material that reflects both the wide range of Franklin's achievements and the global impact of his life and memoirs. New international voices in "Contemporary Opinions" include Immanuel Kant, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau, José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez, and José Francisco Correia da Serra.
"Nineteenth-Century Opinions" includes Humphry Davy on Franklin's discovery of electricity as well as Empress Shoken of Japan's Franklin-inspired poem. Finally, "Modern Opinions" reprints important pieces: I. B. Cohen on Franklin and the autobiography's importance to science; Michael Warner's theoretical interpretation of the practices of writing and printing, and what they tell us about Franklin; and Peter Stallybrass' insightful and engaging history-of-the-book perspective on Franklin's writing generally and the autobiography specifically.
A chronology of Franklin's life is also included.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
First published in 1884, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is among the first novels in American literature to be written throughout in vernacular English. Some have called it the first Great American Novel, and the book has become required reading in many schools throughout the United States. The story is set along the Mississippi River in Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky and Arkansas around 1840. It depicts the development of Huckleberry (Huck) Finn, a boy about thirteen years old.
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-
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By: Mark Twain
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- By: Walter Isaacson
- Narrated by: Nelson Runger
- Length: 24 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us - an ambitious urban entrepreneur who rose up the social ladder, from leather-aproned shopkeeper to dining with kings. In best-selling author Walter Isaacson's vivid and witty full-scale biography, we discover why Franklin turns to us from history's stage with eyes that twinkle from behind his new-fangled spectacles. In Benjamin Franklin, Isaacson shows how Franklin defines both his own time and ours. The most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself.
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- Narrated by: Shelly Frasier
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Story
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By: Kate Chopin
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Bring Back the Bureaucrats
- Why More Federal Workers Will Lead to Better (and Smaller!) Government (New Threats to Freedom)
- By: John DiIulio Jr.
- Narrated by: Joel Richards
- Length: 3 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Bring Back the Bureaucrats, John J. DiIulio, Jr., one of America's most respected political scientists and an adviser to presidents in both parties, summons the facts and statistics to show us how America's big government actually works and why reforms that include adding a million more people to the federal workforce by 2035 might actually help to slow government's growth while improving its performance.
-
-
challenges your preconceptions
- By Edward Quigley on 09-21-20
By: John DiIulio Jr.
-
On Juneteenth
- By: Annette Gordon-Reed
- Narrated by: Karen Chilton
- Length: 3 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Weaving together American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth provides a historian’s view of the country’s long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond.
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-
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- By BK on 05-18-21
What listeners say about Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography (First Edition)
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Adam Huxell
- 09-09-20
Great with the Norton Critical Edition
Used this for class - so sad it’s unfinished. What a great man who had so many astounding discoveries and inventions!
A couple weird omissions throughout, like not stating his bullet under “Chastity,” but other than that, it was great!
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- Speedie Reefdancer
- 01-11-24
Interesting guy. Fast read.
Learned more than I expected. He had a colorful life that is so well documented. Was wishing there was more.
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- Derek
- 10-26-21
Do not buy!!!
It’s not the full book at all and it’s a waste of money. It only goes up to chapter 2. Total rip-off
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