|
Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin The Puritan tradition in writing, of which Benjamin Franklin was weaned, was wound around five primary concepts: the need for a moral justification of public, private and governmental acts; the quest for freedom in the political, personal, social and economic spheres; the puritan work ethic; the morbid fascination with death as characterized by the elegiac verse; and the concept of manifest destiny. Authors such as Roger Williams, Mary White Rowlanson, and John Winthrop were products of this Puritan model and, in their writing, centered their conceptual world around religion and the maintenance of the puritan ethic. Franklin, however, had awakened to a different form of literary construction that would, in time, allow for a much broader interpretation of the world and of literary purpose itself. It is the purpose of this paper to outline how Ben Franklin had distanced himself from the puritan writers and, while maintaining some of their sensibilities, wrote an autobiography that reads like a manual for life. MLA Format.
|