my autobiography

ATTENTION :this autobiography is written in haste, i`ll promise to edit it ASAP.i was born in november 27th 1987. there are 5 of us in the family, my parents a brother a sisiter and me .my brother is 29 and my sister is 27.
i dont remember anything from my infancy..as no one else would remember suchmemories...but what i have always had in my mind is a simple image of my childhood in which a girl of about 3 years old is surrounded by 2 other stingy girls trying to steal her doll from her...and a shy girl is powerless in order to defeat herself.i feel i was born like this...as i have always needed some body to protect me from my weaknesses.
as a 7 year old student i was the most clever one in the class.later on i had been really successfull in the proccess of learning and being a student that i soon became a model for the other students and was climbing the ladders of success.besides i was saving my role as a playfull child after finishing the school hours...what i know from my self the most was keeping the relation ships with boys..may be i couldnt understand that I was growing up,and that my life, my surroundings, my world and .... is going to be different from the boys,I was friends with them, behaving as if they are my girl friends...but that was what i was used to,I couldn`t believe that i`m different !!i were a fantastic football player just as boyswere for my age ..i were too bony and in a real good shape just as they were...constantly i would consider my self like the boys..ages past and I understood that I should keep my world apart from them….finally me the boyish girl departed that world soon and started to be more of a girl…being a real ambitious gir I started fighting for what I wanted..i was unbelievingly good at school, teachers loved me and I were their real assistant in classes.i had continued english from when I was 8 years old and I was going to enter Kish language school to become kids english teacher. After a while I started my career when I was only 16 years old. Entering a new world …this time surrounded by friends and colleagues who were both my friends and my parents as they were all grownups.i think those ages kept me really far from a teenager…I used to behave like my colleagues, like older ones and being well behaved and diciplined…generally far from a naughty teenager…this made me so independent and powerfull. It might be actually fine as I don’t really think that I will need anybody to assist me in the future life even as a husband but on the other hand its ignoring what the parents want, and that is to see their kid choosing the ways they want actullay imposing their ideas..i`m not sure what is going to happen so far..but I hope I will find a good way out.

MARK TWAIN

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910),[1] better known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American humorist, satirist, lecturer and writer. Twain is most noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which has since been called the Great American Novel,[2] and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. He is also known for his quotations.[3][4] During his lifetime, Twain became a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists and European royalty.

Twain enjoyed immense public popularity, and his keen wit and incisive satire earned him praise from both critics and peers. American author William Faulkner called Twain "the father of American literature."[5]

Early life
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835 to a Tennessee country merchant, John Marshall Clemens (August 11, 1798–March 24, 1847), and Jane Lampton Clemens (June 18, 1803–October 27, 1890).[6] He was the sixth of seven children. Only three of his siblings survived childhood: his brothers Orion (July 17, 1825–December 11, 1897) and Henry (July 13, 1838–June 21, 1858) and his sister Pamela (September 19, 1827–August 31, 1904). His sister Margaret (May 31, 1830–August 17, 1839) died when Twain was four years old, and his brother Benjamin (June 8, 1832–May 12, 1842) died three years later. Another brother, Pleasant (1828–1829), died at the age of six months. [7] He was born two weeks after the closest approach to Earth of Halley's Comet (see 1835 comment).

When Twain was four, his family moved to Hannibal,[8] a port town on the Mississippi River that would serve as the inspiration for the fictional town of St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.[9] At that time, Missouri was a slave state in the Union, and young Twain became familiar with the institution of slavery, a theme he later explored in his writing.

In March 1847, when Twain was 11, his father died of pneumonia.[10] The following year, he became a printer's apprentice. In 1851, he began working as a typesetter and contributor of articles and humorous sketches for the Hannibal Journal, a newspaper owned by his brother, Orion. When he was 18, he left Hannibal and worked as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. He joined the union and educated himself in public libraries in the evenings, finding wider sources of information than he would have at a conventional school.[11] At 22, Twain returned to Missouri. On a voyage to New Orleans down the Mississippi, the steamboat pilot, Horace E. Bixby, inspired Twain to pursue a career as a steamboat pilot; it was a richly rewarding occupation with wages set at $250 per month,[12] equivalent to $155,000 a year today.

Because the steamboats at the time were constructed of very dry flammable wood, no lamps were allowed, making night travel a precarious endeavor. A steamboat pilot needed a vast knowledge of the ever-changing river to be able to stop at any of the hundreds of ports and wood-lots along the river banks. Twain meticulously studied 2,000 miles (3,200 km) of the Mississippi for more than two years before he received his steamboat pilot license in 1859. While training, Samuel convinced his younger brother Henry to work with him. Henry was killed on June 21, 1858, when the steamboat he was working on, the Pennsylvania, exploded. Twain had foreseen this death in a detailed dream a month earlier,[13] which inspired his interest in parapsychology; he was an early member of the Society for Psychical Research.[14] Twain was guilt-stricken over his brother's death and held himself responsible for the rest of his life. However, he continued to work on the river and served as a river pilot until the American Civil War broke out in 1861 and traffic along the Mississippi was curtailed.

Travels and family
Missouri was a slave state and considered by many to be part of the South, but it did not join the Confederacy. When the war began, Twain and his friends formed a Confederate militia (depicted in an 1885 short story, "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed"), which drilled for only two weeks before disbanding.[15] Twain joined his brother, Orion, who had been appointed secretary to the territorial governor of Nevada, James W. Nye, and headed west.

Twain and his brother traveled for more than two weeks on a stagecoach across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, visiting the Mormon community in Salt Lake City along the way. These experiences became the basis of the book Roughing It, and provided material for The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. Twain's journey ended in the silver-mining town of Virginia City, Nevada, where he became a miner.[15] Twain failed as a miner and found work at a Virginia City newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise.[16] On February 3, 1863, he signed a humorous travel account "LETTER FROM CARSON - re: Joe Goodman; party at Gov. Johnson's; music" with "Mark Twain".[17]

Twain then traveled to San Francisco, California, where he continued as a journalist and began lecturing. He met other writers such as Bret Harte, Artemus Ward and Dan DeQuille. An assignment in Hawaii became the basis for his first lectures.[18] In 1867, a local newspaper funded a trip to the Mediterranean. During his tour of Europe and the Middle East, he wrote a popular collection of travel letters which were compiled as The Innocents Abroad in 1869.

Twain met Charles Langdon, who showed him a picture of his sister Olivia; Twain claimed to have fallen in love at first sight. They met in 1868, were engaged a year later, and married in February 1870 in Elmira, New York.[18] She came from a "wealthy but liberal family", and through her he met abolitionists, "socialists, principled atheists and activists for women’s rights and social equality", including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass and the utopian socialist William Dean Howells[19].

The couple lived in Buffalo, New York from 1869 to 1871. Twain owned a stake in the Buffalo Express, and worked as an editor and writer. Their son Langdon died of diphtheria at 19 months.

In 1871[20], Twain moved his family to Hartford, Connecticut, where starting in 1873 he arranged the building of a dramatic house for them, which local admirers saved from demolition in 1927 and eventually turned into a museum focused on him. There Olivia gave birth to three daughters: Susy (1872-1896), Clara (1874-1962) [21], and Jean (1880-1909). The couple's marriage lasted 34 years, until Olivia's death in 1904.

During his years in Hartford, Twain became friends with fellow author William Dean Howells.

Later life and death
Twain made a second tour of Europe, described in the 1880 book, A Tramp Abroad. His tour included a visit to London where, in the summer of 1900, he was the guest of newspaper proprietor Hugh Gilzean-Reid at Dollis Hill House. Twain wrote of Dollis Hill that he had "never seen any place that was so satisfactorily situated, with its noble trees and stretch of country, and everything that went to make life delightful, and all within a biscuit's throw of the metropolis of the world."[22] He returned to America in 1900, having earned enough to pay off his debts.

In 1906, Twain began his autobiography in the North American Review. Oxford University awarded him a Doctorate in Letters a year later.

Twain outlived Jean and Susy. He passed through a period of deep depression, which began in 1896 when his favorite daughter Susy died of meningitis. Olivia's death in 1904 and Jean's death on December 24, 1909, deepened his gloom.[23]

In 1909, Twain is quoted as saying:[24]

“ I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'
His prediction was accurate—Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910 in Redding, Connecticut, one day after the comet's closest approach to Earth (see Halley's Comet, 1835 entry).

In the New York Journal, in 1897, Twain said "The report of my death was an exaggeration."

Upon hearing of Twain's death, President Taft said:[25][26]

“ Mark Twain gave pleasure—real intellectual enjoyment—to millions, and his works will continue to give such pleasure to millions yet to come... His humor was American, but he was nearly as much appreciated by Englishmen and people of other countries as by his own countrymen. He has made an enduring part of American literature. ”

Mark Twain is buried in his wife's family plot in Elmira, New York.

Life as a writer

Career overview
Twain began his career writing light, humorous verse but evolved into a grim, almost profane chronicler of the vanities, hypocrisies and murderous acts of mankind. At mid-career, with Huckleberry Finn, he combined rich humor, sturdy narrative and social criticism. Twain was a master at rendering colloquial speech and helped to create and popularize a distinctive American literature built on American themes and language. Many of Mark Twain's works have been suppressed at times for various reasons. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been repeatedly restricted in American high schools, not least for its frequent use of the word "nigger", which was a common term when the book was written.

Unfortunately, a complete bibliography of his works is nearly impossible to compile because of the vast number of pieces wrtten by Clemens (often in obscure newspapers) and his use of several different pennames. Additionally, many believe that a large portion of his speeches and lectures have been lost or simply were not written down; thus, the collection of Clemens's works is an ongoing process. Researchers have rediscovered published material by Twain as recently as 1995.[27]


Early journalism and travelogues
Mark Twain’s first important work, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, was first published in the New York Saturday Press on November 18, 1865. The only reason it was published there was because his story arrived too late to be included in a book Artemus Ward was compiling featuring sketches of the wild American West.

After this burst of popularity, Twain was commissioned by the Sacramento Union to write letters about his travel experiences for publication in the newspaper, his first of which was to ride the steamer Ajax in its maiden voyage to Hawaii, referred to at the time as the Sandwich Islands. These humorous letters proved the genesis to his work with the San Francisco Alta California newspaper, which designated him a traveling correspondent for a trip from San Francisco to New York City via the Panama isthmus. All the while Twain was writing letters meant for publishing back and forth, chronicling his experiences with his burlesque humor. On June 8, 1867, Twain set sail on the pleasure cruiser Quaker City for five months. This trip resulted in The Innocents Abroad or The New Pilgrims' Progress.

This book is a record of a pleasure trip. If it were a record of a solemn scientific expedition it would have about it the gravity, that profundity, and that impressive incomprehensibility which are so proper to works of that kind, and withal so attractive. Yet not withstanding it is only a record of a picnic, it has a purpose, which is, to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled in those countries before him. I make small pretense of showing anyone how he ought to look at objects of interest beyond the sea – other books do that, and therefore, even if I were competent to do it, there is no need. ”

In 1872, Twain published a second piece of travel literature, Roughing It, as a semi-sequel to Innocents. Roughing It is a semi-autobiographical account of Twain's journey to Nevada and his subsequent life in the American West. The book lampoons American and Western society in the same way that Innocents critiqued the various countries of Europe and the Middle East. Twain's next work kept Roughing It's focus on American society but focused more on the events of the day. Entitled The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, it was not a travel piece, as his previous two books had been, and it was his first attempt at writing a novel. The book is also notable because it is Twain's only collaboration; it was written with his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner.

Twain's next two works drew on his experiences on the Mississippi River. Old Times on the Mississippi, a series of sketches published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1875, featured Twain’s disillusionment with Romanticism. Old Times eventually became the starting point for Life on the Mississippi.

Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
Twain's next major publication was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which drew on his youth in Hannibal. The character of Tom Sawyer was modeled on Twain as a child, with traces of two schoolmates, John Briggs and Will Bowen. The book also introduced in a supporting role the character of Huckleberry Finn, based on Twain's boyhood friend Tom Blankenship.

The Prince and the Pauper, despite a storyline that is omnipresent in film and literature today, was not as well received. Telling the story of two boys born on the same day who are physically identical, the book acts as a social commentary as the prince and pauper switch places. Pauper was Twain’s first attempt at fiction, and blame for its shortcomings are usually put on Twain having not been experienced enough in English society and the fact that it was produced after such a massive hit. In between the writing of Pauper, Twain had started Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (which he consistently had problems completing[28] and started and completed another travel book, A Tramp Abroad, which follows Twain as he travels through central and southern Europe.

Twain’s next major published work, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, solidified him as a noteworthy American writer. Some have called it the first Great American Novel. Finn was an offshoot from Tom Sawyer and proved to have a more serious tone than its predecessor. The main premise behind Huckleberry Finn is the young boy’s belief in the right thing to do even though the majority of society believes that it was wrong. The book has become required reading in many schools throughout the United States because Huck ignores the rules and mores of the age to follow what he thinks is just (the story takes place in the 1850s where slavery is present). Four hundred manuscript pages of Huckleberry Finn were written in the summer of 1876, right after the publication of Tom Sawyer. Some accounts have Twain taking seven years off after his first burst of creativity, eventually finishing the book in 1883. Other accounts have Twain working on Finn in tandem with The Prince and the Pauper and other works in 1880 and other years. The last fifth of Finn is subject to much controversy. Some say that Twain experiences—as critic Leo Marx puts it—a "failure of nerve." Ernest Hemingway once said of Huckleberry Finn: “If you read it, you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating.”[29]

Near the completion of Huckleberry Finn, Twain wrote Life on the Mississippi, which is said to have heavily influenced the former book.[27] The work recounts Twain’s memories and new experiences after a 22-year absence from the Mississippi. The book is of note because Twain introduces the real meaning of his pseudonym.

Later writing
After his great work, Twain began turning to his business endeavors to keep them afloat and to stave off the increasing difficulties he had been having from his writing projects. Twain focused on President Ulysses S. Grant's Memoirs for his fledgling publishing company, finding time in between to write "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed" for The Century Magazine. This piece detailed his two-week stint in a Confederate militia during the Civil War. The name of his publishing company was Charles L. Webster & Company, which he owned with Charles L. Webster, his nephew by marriage.[30]

Twain next focused on A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which featured him making his first big pronouncement of disappointment with politics. Written with the same "historical fiction" style of The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court showed the absurdities of political and social norms by setting them in the court of King Arthur. The book was started in December 1885, then shelved a few months later until the summer of 1887, and eventually finished in the spring of 1889.

Twain had begun to furiously write articles and commentary with diminishing returns to pay the bills and keep his business intentions afloat, but it was not enough because he filed for bankruptcy in 1894. His next large scale work, Pudd'nhead Wilson was written rapidly, as Twain was furiously trying to stave off the bankruptcy. In the month from November 12 to December 14, 1893, Twain wrote a staggering 60,000 words for the novel.[27] Critics have pointed to this rushed completion as the cause of the novel's rough organization and constant disruption of continuous plot. There were parallels between this work and Twain's financial failings, notably his desire to escape his current constraints and become a different person.

Interestingly, the actual title of this novel is not clearly established. It was first published serially in Century Magazine, and when it was finally published in book form, "Pudd'nhead Wilson" appeared as the main title. However, the disputed "subtitles" make the entire title read, "The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Comedy of The Extraordinary Twins."[27]

This novel also contains the tale of two boys born on the same day (see The Prince and the Pauper) who switch positions in life. Considering the circumstances of Clemens's birth and Halley's Comet and his strong belief in the paranormal, it is not surprising that these "mystic" connections recur throughout his writing.

Twain’s next venture was a work of straight fiction that he called Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc and dedicated to his wife. Twain had long said that this was the work of which he was most proud, despite the criticism he received for it. The book had been a dream of his since childhood; he claimed that he had found a manuscript detailing the life of Joan of Arc when he was an adolescent.[27] This was another piece which Twain was convinced would save his publishing company. His financial adviser, Henry Huttleston Rogers, squashed that idea and got Twain out of that business altogether, but the book was published nonetheless.

During this time of dire financial straits, Clemens published several literary reviews in newspapers to help make ends meet. He famously derided James Fenimore Cooper in his article detailing Cooper's Literary Offenses. He became an extremely outspoken critic not only of other authors, but also of other critics, suggesting that before praising Cooper's work, Professors Loundsbury, Brander Matthes, and Wilkie Collins "ought to have read some of it."[31]

Other authors to fall under Clemens's attack during this time period (beginning around 1890 until his death) were George Eliot, Jane Austen, and Robert Louis Stevenson.[32]. Some have noticed a trend in literary criticism to mimic Twain's style, as contemporary critics often ballast not merely portions of a work, opting instead to insult and belittle an author's entire bibliography. It appears that Twain was the first to use such puerile language in describing established authors (and these authors were often quite popular at the time Twain was lambasting them). In addition to providing a source for the "tooth and claw" style of literary criticism, Twain outlines in several letters and essays what he considers to be "quality writing." He places particular emphasis on concision, utility of word choice, and realism (he complains that Cooper's Deerslayer purports to be realistic but has several shortcomings). Ironically, several of his works were later criticized for lack of continuity (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) and organization (Pudd'nhead Wilson).

Twain’s wife died in 1904, and after an appropriate time Twain allowed himself to publish some works that his wife, a de facto editor and censor throughout his life, had looked down upon. Of these works, The Mysterious Stranger, which places the presence of Satan, also known as “No. 44,” in various situations where the moral sense of humankind is absent, is perhaps the best known. This particular work was not published in Twain’s lifetime. There were three versions found in his manuscripts made between 1897 and 1905: the Hannibal version, the Eseldorf version, and the Print Shop version. Confusion between the versions led to an extensive publication of a jumbled version, and only recently have the original versions as Twain wrote them become available.

Twain’s last work was his autobiography, which he dictated and thought would be most entertaining if he went off on whims and tangents in non-sequential order. Some archivists and compilers had a problem with this and rearranged the biography into a more conventional form, thereby eliminating some of Twain’s humor and the flow of the book.


Political and religious views
While his reputation as a popular author overshadows his contributions as a social critic, Twain held strong views on the political topics of his day; his friend Helen Keller had her radicalism similarly neutralised by history. Through his wife's family, Twain had contact with many well-placed progressives. He spent the last 20 years of his life as an "outspoken anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist"[39].


Changing his views
Although Twain remained neutral during the Civil War, his views became more radical as he grew older. He acknowledged that his views changed and developed over his life, referring to one of his favorite works:

When I finished Carlyle’s French Revolution in 1871, I was a Girondin; every time I have read it since, I have read it differently – being influenced and changed, little by little, by life and environment ... and now I lay the book down once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte! – And not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat.[40]

He describes his transformation and political awakening, in the context of the Philippine-American War, from being "a red-hot imperialist":

I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific ...Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself? ... I said to myself, Here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American Constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves. But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris [which ended the Spanish-American War], and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.[41]

Anti-imperialism
From 1901, soon after his return from Europe, until his death in 1910, Twain was vice-president of the American Anti-Imperialist League[42], which opposed the annexation of the Philippines by the United States and had "tens of thousands of members"[43]. He wrote many political pamphlets for the organization. The Incident in the Philippines, posthumously published in 1924, was in response to the Moro Crater Massacre, in which six hundred Moros were killed. Many of his neglected and previously uncollected writings on anti-imperialism appeared for the first time in book form only in 1992.[citation needed]

Twain was critical of imperialism in other countries as well. In Following the Equator, Twain expresses "hatred and condemnation of imperialism of all stripes"[44]. He was highly critical of European imperialism, notably of Cecil Rhodes, who greatly expanded the British Empire, and of Leopold II, King of the Belgians[45]. King Leopold's Soliloquy is a stinging political satire about his private colony, the Congo Free State. Reports of outrageous exploitation and grotesque abuses led to widespread international protest in the early 1900s, arguably the first large-scale human rights movement. In the soliloquy, the King supposedly argues that bringing Christianity to the country outweighs a little starvation. Leopold's rubber gatherers were tortured, maimed and slaughtered until the turn of the century, when the conscience of the Western world forced Brussels to call a halt.

Religion
After his death, Twain's family suppressed some of his work which was especially irreverent toward conventional religion, notably Letters from the Earth, which was not published until his daughter Clara reversed her position in 1962 in response to Soviet propaganda about the withholding.[citation needed] The anti-religious The Mysterious Stranger was published in 1916, although there is some scholarly debate as to whether Twain actually wrote the most familiar version of this story. Twain was critical of organized religion and certain elements of Christianity through most of his later life.

washington Irving

Washington Irving
Washington Irving (April 3, 1783 – November 28, 1859) was an American author of the early 19th century. Best known for his short stories "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle" (both of which appear in his book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.), he was also a prolific essayist, biographer and historian. His historical works include biographies of George Washington, Oliver Goldsmith and Muhammad, and several histories of 15th century Spain dealing with subjects such as Columbus, the Moors, and the Alhambra. Irving also served as the U.S. minister to Spain from 1842 to 1846.

He made his literary debut in 1802 with a series of observational letters to the Morning Chronicle, written under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle. After moving to England for the family business in 1815, he achieved international fame with the publication of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819. He continued to publish regularly — and almost always successfully — throughout his life, and completed a five-volume biography of George Washington just eight months before his death, at age 76, in Tarrytown, New York.

Irving, along with James Fenimore Cooper, was the first American writer to earn acclaim in Europe, and Irving encouraged American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Edgar Allan Poe. Irving was also admired by a number of European writers, including Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Thomas Campbell, Francis Jeffrey, and Charles Dickens. As America's first genuine internationally best-selling author, Irving advocated for writing as a legitimate profession, and argued for stronger laws to protect American writers from copyright infringement.

Biography

Early years
Washington Irving's parents were William Irving, Sr., originally of Shapinsay, Orkney, and Sarah (née Sanders), Scottish-English immigrants. They were married in 1761 while William was serving as a petty officer in the British Navy. They had eleven children, eight of which survived to adulthood. Their first two sons, each named William, died in infancy, as did their fourth child, John. Their surviving children were: William, Jr. (1766), Ann (1770), Peter (1772), Catherine (1774), Ebenezer (1776), John Treat (1778), and Sarah (1780).[1]

The Irving family was settled in Manhattan as an established part of that city's small vibrant merchant class when Washington Irving was born on April 3, 1783[1] the same week city residents learned of the British ceasefire that ended the American Revolution. Consequently, Irving’s mother named him after the hero of the revolution, George Washington.[2] At age six, with the help of a nanny, Irving met his namesake, who was then living in New York City after his inauguration as president in 1789. The president blessed young Irving,[3] an encounter Irving later commemorated as a small watercolor painting, which still hangs in his home today.[4] Several of Washington Irving's older brothers became active New York merchants, and they encouraged their younger brother's literary aspirations, often supporting him financially as he pursued a writing career.

An uninterested student, Irving preferred adventure stories and drama and, by age fourteen, he was regularly sneaking out in the evenings to attend the theater.[5] A 1798 outbreak of yellow fever in Manhattan prompted his family to send him to healthier climes upriver, and Irving was dispatched to stay with his friend James Kirke Paulding in Tarrytown, New York. It was here that Irving became familiar with the nearby town of Sleepy Hollow, with its quaint Dutch customs and local ghost stories.[6] Irving made several other trips up the Hudson as a teenager, including an extended visit to Johnstown, New York, where he passed through the Catskill mountain region, the setting for "Rip Van Winkle". "[O]f all the scenery of the Hudson," Irving wrote later, "the Kaatskill Mountains had the most witching effect on my boyish imagination."[7]

In 1802, the nineteen-year-old Irving began writing letters to The Morning Chronicle, submitting commentaries on New York's social and theater scene under the name of Jonathan Oldstyle. The name, which purposely evoked the

writer's Federalist leanings,[8] was the first of many pseudonyms Irving would employ throughout his career. The letters brought Irving some early fame and moderate notoriety. Aaron Burr, a co-publisher of the Chronicle, was impressed enough to send clippings of the Oldstyle pieces to his daughter, Theodosia, while writer Charles Brockden Brown made a trip to New York to recruit Oldstyle for a literary magazine he was editing in Philadelphia.[9]

Concerned for his health, Irving's brothers financed an extended tour of Europe from 1804 to 1806. Irving bypassed most of the sites and locations considered essential for the development of an upwardly-mobile young man, to the dismay of his brother William. William wrote that, though he was pleased his brother's health was improving, he did not like the choice to "gallop through Italy... leaving Florence on your left and Venice on your right".[10] Instead, Irving honed the social and conversational skills that would later make him one of the world's most in-demand guests.[11] "I endeavor to take things as they come with cheerfulness," Irving wrote, "and when I cannot get a dinner to suit my taste, I endeavor to get a taste to suit my dinner."[12] While visiting Rome in 1805, Irving struck up a friendship with the American painter Washington Allston,[10] and nearly allowed himself to be persuaded into following Allston into a career as a painter. "My lot in life, however," Irving said later, "was differently cast."
Life in Europe

The Sketch Book

Irving spent the next two years trying to bail out the family firm financially but was eventually forced to declare bankruptcy.[27] With no job prospects, Irving continued writing throughout 1817 and 1818. In the summer of 1817, he visited the home of novelist Walter Scott, marking the beginning of a lifelong personal and professional friendship for both men.[28] Irving continued writing prolifically — the short story "Rip Van Winkle" was written overnight while staying with his sister Sarah and her husband, Henry van Wart in Birmingham, England, a place that also inspired some of his other works.[29] In October 1818, Irving's brother William secured for Irving a post as chief clerk to the United States navy, and urged him to return home.[30] Irving, however, turned the offer down, opting to stay in England to pursue a writing career.[31]

In the spring of 1819, Irving sent to his brother Ebenezer in New York a set of essays that he asked be published as The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. The first installment, containing "Rip Van Winkle," was an enormous success, and the rest of the work, published in seven installments in the United States and England throughout 1819 and 1820 ("The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" would appear in the sixth issue), would be equally as successful.[32]

Like many successful authors of this era, Irving struggled against literary bootleggers.[33] While in England, his sketches were published in book form by British publishers without his permission, an entirely legal practice as there were no clear international copyright laws. Seeking an English publisher to protect his copyright, Irving appealed to Walter Scott for help. Scott referred Irving to his own publisher, London powerhouse John Murray, who agreed to take on The Sketch Book.[34] From then on, Irving would publish concurrently in the United States and England to protect his copyright, with Murray being his English publisher of choice.[35]

Bracebridge Hall and Tales of a Traveller
Irving was anxious to follow up on the success of The Sketch Book, and traveled to the continent in search of new material, reading widely in Dutch and German folk tales. His next book, Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists, A Medley (the location was based loosely on Aston Hall near his sister's home in Birmingham) was published in 1822, and was well-received by readers and critics.[37]

Struggling with writer's block, Irving traveled to Germany, settling in Dresden in the winter of 1822. Here he dazzled the royal family and attached himself to Mrs. Amelia Foster, an American living in Dresden with her five children.[38] Irving was particularly attracted to Mrs. Foster's 18-year-old daughter Emily, and vied in frustration for her hand. Emily finally refused his offer of marriage in the spring of 1823.[39]

He returned to Paris and began collaborating with playwright John Howard Payne on translations of French plays for the English stage, with little success. He also learned through Payne that the novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was romantically interested in him, though Irving never pursued the relationship.[40]

In August 1824, Irving published the collection of essays Tales of a Traveller — including the short story "The Devil and Tom Walker" — under his Geoffrey Crayon persona. While the book sold respectably, Traveller bombed with critics.
Spanish books
While in Paris, Irving received a letter from Alexander Hill Everett on January 30, 1826. Everett, recently the American Minister to Spain, urged Irving to join him in Madrid,[43] noting that a number of manuscripts dealing with the Spanish conquest of the Americas had recently been made public. Irving left for Madrid and enthusiastically began scouring the Spanish archives for colorful material.[44]
With full access to the American consul's massive library of Spanish history, Irving began working on several books at once. The first offspring of this hard work, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, was published in January 1828. The book was popular in the United States and in Europe and would have 175 editions published before the end of the century.[45] It was also the first project of Irving's to be published with his own name, instead of a pseudonym, on the title page.[46] The Chronicles of the Conquest of Granada was published a year later,[47] followed by Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus in 1831.[48]

Irving's writings on Columbus are a mixture of history and fiction, a genre now called romantic history. Irving based them on extensive research in the Spanish archives, but also added imaginative elements aimed at sharpening the story. The first of these works is the source of the durable myth that medieval Europeans believed the Earth was flat.[citation needed]

In 1829, Irving moved into Granada's ancient palace Alhambra, "determined to linger here," he said, "until I get some writings under way connected with the place."[49] Before he could get any significant writing underway, however, he was notified of his appointment as Secretary to the American Legation in London. Worried he would disappoint friends and family if he refused the position, Irving left Spain for England in July 1829.[50]


Secretary to the American legation in London
Arriving in London, Irving joined the staff of American Minister Louis McLane. McLane immediately assigned the daily secretary work to another man and tapped Irving to fill the role of aide-de-camp. The two worked over the next year to negotiate a trade agreement between the United States and the British West Indies, finally reaching a deal in August 1830. That same year, Irving was awarded a medal by the Royal Society of Literature, followed by an honorary doctorate of civil law from Oxford in 1831.[51]

Following McLane's recall to the United States in 1831 to serve as Secretary of Treasury, Irving stayed on as the legation's chargé d'affaires until the arrival of Martin Van Buren, President Jackson's nominee for British Minister. With Van Buren in place, Irving resigned his post to concentrate on writing, eventually completing Tales of the Alhambra, which would be published concurrently in the United States and England in 1832.[citation needed]

Irving was still in London when Van Buren received word that the United States Senate had refused to confirm him as the new Minister. Consoling Van Buren, Irving predicted that the Senate's partisan move would backfire. "I should not be surprised," Irving said, "if this vote of the Senate goes far toward elevating him to the presidential chair."[52]
Return to America
Washington Irving arrived in New York, after seventeen years abroad on May 21, 1832. That September, he accompanied the U.S. Commissioner on Indian Affairs, Henry Ellsworth, along with companions Charles La Trobe[53] and Count Albert-Alexandre de Pourtales, on a surveying mission deep in Indian Territory.[54] At the

completion of his western tour, Irving traveled through Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, where he became acquainted with the politician and novelist John Pendleton Kennedy.[55]

Frustrated by bad investments, Irving turned to writing to generate additional income, beginning with A Tour on the Prairies, a work which related his recent travels on the frontier. The book was another popular success and also the first book written and published by Irving in the United States since A History of New York in 1809.[56] In 1834, he was approached by fur magnate John Jacob Astor, who convinced Irving to write a history of his fur trading colony in the American Northwest, now known as Astoria, Oregon. Irving made quick work of Astor's project, shipping the fawning biographical account titled Astoria in February 1836.[57]

During an extended stay at Astor's, Irving met the explorer Benjamin Bonneville, who intrigued Irving with his maps and stories of the territories beyond the Rocky Mountains.[58] When the two met in Washington, D.C. several months later, Bonneville opted to sell his maps and rough notes to Irving for $1,000.[59] Irving used these materials as the basis for his 1837 book The Adventures of Captain Bonneville.[60]

These three works made up Irving's "western" series of books and were written partly as a response to criticism that his time in England and Spain had made him more European than American.[61] In the minds of some critics, especially James Fenimore Cooper, Irving had turned his back on his American heritage in favor of English aristocracy.[62] Irving's western books, particularly A Tour on the Prairies, were well-received in the United States,[63] though British critics accused Irving of "book-making".[64]

In 1835, Irving purchased a "neglected cottage" and its surrounding riverfront property in Tarrytown, New York. The house, which Irving named Sunnyside in 1841,[65] would require constant repair and renovation over the next twenty years. With costs of Sunnyside escalating, Irving reluctantly agreed in 1839 to become a regular contributor to Knickerbocker magazine, writing new essays and short stories under the Knickerbocker and Crayon pseudonyms.[66]

Irving was regularly approached by aspiring young authors for advice or endorsement, including Edgar Allan Poe, who sought Irving's comments "on William Wilson" and "The Fall of the House of Usher".[67] Irving also championed America's maturing literature, advocating for stronger copyright laws to protect writers from the kind of piracy that had initially plagued The Sketch Book. Writing in the January 1840 issue of Knickerbocker, he openly endorsed copyright legislation pending in the U.S. Congress. "We have a young literature", Irving wrote, "springing up and daily unfolding itself with wonderful energy and luxuriance, which... deserves all its fostering care." The legislation did not pass.[68]

Irving at this time also began a friendly correspondence with the English writer Charles Dickens, and hosted the author and his wife at Sunnyside during Dickens's American tour in 1842.[69]

Minister to Spain
In 1842, after an endorsement from Secretary of State Daniel Webster, President John Tyler appointed Irving as Minister to Spain.[70] Irving was surprised and honored, writing, "It will be a severe trial to absent myself for a time from my dear little Sunnyside, but I shall return to it better enabled to carry it on comfortably."[71]

While Irving hoped his position as Minister would allow him plenty of time to write, Spain was in a state of perpetual political upheaval during most of his tenure, with a number of warring factions vying for control of the twelve-year-old Queen Isabella II.[72] Irving maintained good relations with the various generals and politicians, as control of Spain rotated through Espartero, Bravo, then Narvaez. However, the politics and warfare were exhausting, and Irving — homesick and suffering from a crippling skin condition — grew quickly disheartened:

“ I am wearied and at times heartsick of the wretched politics of this country. . . . The last ten or twelve years of my life, passed among sordid speculators in the United States, and political adventurers in Spain, has shewn me so much of the dark side of human nature, that I begin to have painful doubts of my fellow man; and look back with regret to the confiding period of my literary career, when, poor as a rat, but rich in dreams, I beheld the world through the medium of my imagination and was apt to believe men as good as I wished them to be.[73] ”

With the political situation in Spain relatively settled, Irving continued to closely monitor the development of the new government and the fate of Isabella. His official duties as Spanish Minister also involved negotiating American trade interests with Cuba and following the Spanish parliament's debates over slave trade. He was also pressed into service by the American Minister to the Court of St. James's in London, Louis McLane, to assist in negotiating the Anglo-American disagreement over the Oregon border that newly-elected president James K. Polk had vowed to resolve.[74]

Final years and death
Returning from Spain in 1846, Irving took up permanent residence at Sunnyside and began work on an "Author's Revised Edition" of his works for publisher George Palmer Putnam. For its publication, Irving had made a deal that guaranteed him 12 percent of the retail price of all copies sold. Such an agreement was unprecedented at that time.[75] On the death of John Jacob Astor in 1848, Irving was hired as an executor of Astor's estate and appointed, by Astor's will, as first chairman of the Astor library, a forerunner to the New York Public Library.[76]

As he revised his older works for Putnam, Irving continued to write regularly, publishing biographies of the writer and poet Oliver Goldsmith in 1849 and the prophet Muhammad in 1850. In 1855, he produced Wolfert's Roost, a collection of stories and essays he had originally written for Knickerbocker,[77] and began publishing at intervals a biography of his namesake, George Washington, a work which he expected to be his masterpiece. Five volumes of the biography were published between 1855 and 1859.[78] Irving traveled regularly to Mount Vernon and Washington, D.C. for his research, and struck up friendships with Presidents Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce.[77]

He continued to socialize and keep up with his correspondence well into his seventies, and his fame and popularity continued to soar. "I don’t believe that any man, in any country, has ever had a more affectionate admiration for him than that given to you in America", wrote Senator William C. Preston in a letter to Irving. "I believe that we have had but one man who is so much in the popular heart."[79]

On the evening of November 28, 1859, only eight months after completing the final volume of his Washington biography, Washington Irving died of a heart attack in his bedroom at Sunnyside at the age of 76. Legend has it that his last words were: "Well, I must arrange my pillows for another night. When will this end?"[80] He was buried under a simple headstone at Sleepy Hollow cemetery on December 1, 1859.[81]

Irving and his grave were commemorated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his 1876 poem, "In The Churchyard at Tarrytown", which concludes with:

How sweet a life was his; how sweet a death!
Living, to wing with mirth the weary hours,
Or with romantic tales the heart to cheer;
Dying, to leave a memory like the breath
Of summers full of sunshine and of showers,
A grief and gladness in the atmosphere.[82]
Legacy
Literary reputation

Irving is largely credited as the first American Man of Letters, and the first to earn his living solely by his pen. Eulogizing Irving before the Massachusetts Historical Society in December 1859, his friend, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, acknowledged Irving's role in promoting American literature: "We feel a just pride in his renown as an author, not forgetting that, to his other claims upon our gratitude, he adds also that of having been the first to win for our country an honourable name and position in the History of Letters."[83]

Irving perfected the American short story,[84] and was the first American writer to place his stories firmly in the United States, even as he poached from German or Dutch folklore. He is also generally credited as one of the first to write both in the vernacular, and without an obligation to the moral or didactic in his short stories, writing stories simply to entertain rather to enlighten.[85]

Some critics, however — including Edgar Allan Poe — felt that while Irving should be given credit for being an innovator, the writing itself was often unsophisticated. "Irving is much over-rated," Poe wrote in 1838, "and a nice distinction might be drawn between his just and his surreptitious and adventitious reputation—between what is due to the pioneer solely, and what to the writer."[86]

Other critics were inclined to be more forgiving of Irving's style. Henry Makepeace Thakeray was the first to refer to Irving as the "ambassador whom the New World of Letters sent to the Old,"[87] a banner picked up by writers and critics throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. "He is the first of the American humorists, as he is almost the first of the American writers," wrote critic H.R. Hawless in 1881, "yet belonging to the New World, there is a quaint Old World flavor about him."[88]

Early critics often had difficulty separating Irving the man from Irving the writer — "The life of Washington Irving was one of the brightest ever led by an author," wrote Richard Henry Stoddard, an early Irving biographer[89] — but as years passed and Irving's celebrity personality faded into the background, critics often began to review his writings as all style, no substance. "The man had no message," said critic Barrett Wendell.[90] Yet, critics conceded that despite Irving's lack of sophisticated themes — Irving biographer Stanley T. Williams could be scathing in his assessment of Irving's work[91] — most agreed he wrote elegantly.

Impact on American culture
Irving popularized the nickname "Gotham" for New York City, later used in Batman comics and movies, and is credited with inventing the expression "the Almighty dollar".
The surname of his Dutch historian, Diedrich Knickerbocker, is generally associated with New York and New Yorkers, and can still be seen across the jerseys of New York's professional basketball team, albeit in its more familiar, abbreviated form, reading simply Knicks.
One of Irving's most lasting contributions to American culture is in the way Americans perceive and celebrate Christmas. In his 1812 revisions to A History of New York, Irving inserted a dream sequence featuring St. Nicholas soaring over treetops in a flying wagon — a creation others would later dress up as Santa Claus. Later, in his five Christmas stories in The Sketch Book, Irving portrayed an idealized celebration of old-fashioned Christmas customs at a quaint English manor, which directly contributed to the revival and reinterpretation of the Christmas holiday in the United States.[92] Charles Dickens later credited Irving as a strong influence on his own Christmas writings, including the classic A Christmas Carol.
Washington Irving's home — Sunnyside — is still standing, just south of the Tappan Zee Bridge in Tarrytown, New York. The original house and the surrounding property were once owned by 18th-century colonialist Wolfert Acker, about whom Irving wrote his sketch Wolfert's Roost (the name of the house). The house is now owned and operated as an historic site by Historic Hudson Valley and is open to the public for tours.

Works by Washington Irving
Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle 1802 Jonathan Oldstyle Observational Letters
Salmagundi 1807-1808 Launcelot Langstaff, Will Wizard, et al Satire
A History of New York 1809 Diedrich Knickerbocker Satire
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. 1819-1820 Geoffrey Crayon Short stories/Essays
Bracebridge Hall 1822 Geoffrey Crayon Short stories/Essays
Tales of a Traveller 1824 Geoffrey Crayon Short stories/Essays
The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus 1828 Washington Irving Biography/Historical novel
The Chronicles of the Conquest of Granada 1829 Fray Antonio Agapida[94] Romantic history
Voyages and Discoveries
of the Companions of Columbus 1831 Washington Irving Biography/History
Tales of the Alhambra 1832 "The Author of the Sketch Book" Short stories/Travel
The Crayon Miscellany[95] 1835 Geoffrey Crayon Short stories
Astoria 1836 Washington Irving Biography/History
The Adventures of Captain Bonneville 1837 Washington Irving Biography/Romantic History
The Life of Oliver Goldsmith 1840
(revised 1849) Washington Irving Biography
Biography and Poetical Remains
of the Late Margaret Miller Davidson 1841 Washington Irving Biography
Mahomet and His Successors 1850 Washington Irving Biography
Wolfert's Roost 1855 Geoffrey Crayon
Diedrich Knickerbocker
Washington Irving Biography
The Life of George Washington (5 volumes)

Francis Parkman
Francis Parkman (September 16, 1823 – November 8, 1893) was an American historian, best known as author of The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life and his monumental seven volume France and England in North America. These works are still valued as history and especially as literature, although the biases of his work have met with criticism. He was also a leading horticulturist, briefly a Professor of Horticulture at Harvard University and the first leader of the Arnold Arboretum, originator of several flowers, and author of several books on the topic.
Biography
Parkman was born in Boston, Massachusetts to Reverend Francis Parkman Sr. (1788-1852) and Caroline (Hall) Parkman. As a young boy, 'Frank' Parkman was found to be of poor health, and was sent to live with his maternal grandfather, who owned a 3000 acre (12 km²) tract of wilderness in nearby Medford, Massachusetts, in the hopes that a more rustic lifestyle would make him more sturdy. In the four years he stayed there, Parkman developed his love of the forests, which would animate his historical research. Indeed, he would later summarize his books as "the history of the American forest." He learned how to sleep and hunt, and could survive in the wilderness like a true pioneer. He later even learned to ride bareback, a skill that would come in handy when he found himself living with the Sioux.

Parkman enrolled at Harvard College at age 16. In his second year he conceived the plan that would become his life's work. In 1843, at the age of 20, he traveled to Europe for eight months in the fashion of the Grand Tour. Parkman made expeditions through the Alps and the Apennine mountains, climbed Vesuvius, and even lived for a time in Rome, where he befriended Passionist monks who tried, unsuccessfully, to convert him to Catholicism.

Upon graduation in 1846, he was persuaded to get a law degree, his father hoping such study would rid Parkman of his desire to write his history of the forests. It did no such thing, and after finishing law school Parkman proceeded to fulfill his great plan. His family was somewhat appalled at Parkman's choice of life work, since at the time writing histories of the American wilderness was considered ungentlemanly. Serious historians would study ancient history, or after the fashion of the time, the Spanish Empire. Parkman's works became so well-received that by the end of his lifetime histories of early America had become the fashion. Theodore Roosevelt dedicated his four-volume history of the frontier, The Winning of the West (1889-1896), to Parkman.

In 1846, Parkman travelled west on a hunting expedition, where he spent a number of weeks living with the Sioux tribe, at a time when they were struggling with some of the effects of contact with Europeans, such as epidemic disease and alcoholism. This experience led Parkman to write about American Indians with a much different tone from earlier, more sympathetic portrayals represented by the "noble savage" stereotype. Writing in the era of Manifest Destiny, Parkman believed that the conquest and displacement of American Indians represented progress, a triumph of "civilization" over "savagery", a common view at the time.[1]

A scion of a wealthy Boston family, Parkman had enough money to pursue his research without having to worry too much about finances. His financial stability was enhanced by his modest lifestyle, and later, by the royalties from his book sales. He was thus able to commit much of his time to research, as well as to travel. He travelled across North America, visiting most of the historical locations he wrote about, and made frequent trips to Europe seeking original documents with which to further his research.

Parkman's accomplishments are all the more impressive in light of the fact that he suffered from a debilitating neurological illness, which plagued him his entire life, and which was never properly diagnosed. He was often unable to walk, and for long periods he was effectively blind, being unable to stand but the slightest amount of light. Much of his research involved having people read documents to him, and much of his writing was written in the dark, or dictated to others.

Parkman married Catherine Scollay Bigelow on May 13, 1850; they had three children. A son died in childhood, and shortly afterwards, his wife died. He successfully raised two daughters, introducing them in to Boston society and seeing them both wed, with families of their own. He died at age 70 in Jamaica Plain. The Parkman School in Forest Hills bears his name.

Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 [O.S. January 6, 1706] – April 17, 1790) was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author and printer, satirist, political theorist, politician, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman and diplomat. As a scientist he was a major figure in the Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. He invented the lightning rod, bifocals, the Franklin stove, a carriage odometer, and a musical instrument. He formed both the first public lending library in America and first fire department in Pennsylvania. He was an early proponent of colonial unity and as a political writer and activist he, more than anyone, invented the idea of an American nation[1] and as a diplomat during the American Revolution, he secured the French alliance that helped to make independence possible.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Franklin learned printing from his older brother and became a newspaper editor, printer, and merchant in Philadelphia, becoming very wealthy, writing and publishing Poor Richard's Almanack and the Pennsylvania Gazette. Franklin was interested in science and technology, and gained international renown for his famous experiments. He played a major role in establishing the University of Pennsylvania and Franklin & Marshall College and was elected the first president of the American Philosophical Society. Franklin became a national hero in America when he spearheaded the effort to have Parliament repeal the unpopular Stamp Act. An accomplished diplomat, he was widely admired among the French as American minister to Paris and was a major figure in the development of positive Franco-American relations. From 1775 to 1776, Franklin was Postmaster General under the Continental Congress and from 1785 to 1788 was President of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania. Toward the end of his life, he became one of the most prominent abolitionists.

Biography
Ancestry
Franklin's father, Josiah Franklin, was born at Ecton, Northamptonshire, England on December 23, 1657, the son of Thomas Franklin, a blacksmith and farmer, and Jane White. His mother, Abiah Folger, was born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, on August 15, 1667, to Peter Folger, a miller and schoolteacher and his wife Mary Morrill, a former indentured servant. A descendant of the Folgers, J. A. Folger, founded Folgers Coffee in the 19th century.

Ben Franklin's great-great-grandmother was Alice Elmy from Diss on the Suffolk / Norfolk border in England.

Around 1677, Josiah married Anne Child at Ecton, and over the next few years had three children. These half-siblings of Benjamin Franklin included Elizabeth (March 2, 1678), Samuel (May 16, 1681), and Hannah (May 25, 1683).

Sometime during the second half of 1683, the Franklins left England for Boston, Massachusetts. They had several more children in Boston, including Josiah Jr. (August 23, 1685), Ann (January 5, 1687), Joseph (February 5, 1688), and Joseph (June 30, 1689) (the first Joseph died soon after birth).

Josiah's first wife, Anne, died in Boston on July 9, 1689. He was married to Abiah Folger on November 25, 1689 in the Old South Meeting House of Boston by Samuel Willard.

Josiah and Abiah had the following children: John (December 7, 1690), Peter (November 22, 1692), Mary (September 26, 1694), James (February 4, 1697), Sarah (July 9, 1699), Ebenezer (September 20, 1701), Thomas (December 7, 1703), Benjamin (January 17, 1706), Lydia (August 8, 1708), and Jane (March 27, 1712).


Early life
Benjamin Franklin was born on Milk Street in Boston on January 17, 1706[2] and baptized at Old South Meeting House. His father, Josiah Franklin, was a tallow chandler, a maker of candles and soap, whose second wife, Abiah Folger, was Benjamin's mother. Josiah's marriages produced 17 children; Benjamin was the fifteenth child and youngest son. Josiah wanted Ben to attend school with the clergy but only had enough money to send him to school for two years. He attended Boston Latin School but did not graduate; he continued his education through voracious reading. Although "his parents talked of the church as a career" for Franklin, his schooling ended when he was ten. He then worked for his father for a time and at 12 he became an apprentice to his brother James, a printer. When Ben was 15, James created the New England Courant, the first truly independent newspaper in the colonies. When denied the option to write to the paper, Franklin invented the pseudonym of Mrs. Silence Dogood, who was ostensibly a middle-aged widow. The letters were published in the paper and became a subject of conversation around town. Neither James nor the Courant's readers were aware of the ruse, and James was unhappy with Ben when he discovered the popular correspondent was his younger brother. Franklin left his apprenticeship without permission and in so doing became a fugitive.[3]

At age 17, Franklin ran away to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, seeking a new start in a new city. When he first arrived he worked in several printer shops around town. However, he was not satisfied by the immediate prospects. After a few months, while working in a printing house, Franklin was convinced by Pennsylvania Governor Sir William Keith to go to London, ostensibly to acquire the equipment necessary for establishing another newspaper in Philadelphia. Finding Keith's promises of backing a newspaper to be empty, Franklin worked as a compositor in a printer's shop in what is now the Church of St Bartholomew-the-Great in the Smithfield area of London. Following this, he returned to Philadelphia in 1726 with the help of a merchant named Thomas Denham, who gave Franklin a position as clerk, shopkeeper, and bookkeeper in Denham's merchant business.[3]

In 1727, Benjamin Franklin, 21, created the Junto, a group of "like minded aspiring artisans and tradesmen who hoped to improve themselves while they improved their community." The Junto was a discussion group for issues of the day; it subsequently gave rise to many organizations in Philadelphia.

Reading was a great pastime of the Junto, but books were rare and expensive. The members created a library, and initially pooled their own books together. This did not work, however, and Franklin initiated the idea of a subscription library, where the members pooled their monetary resources to buy books. This idea was the birth of the Library Company, with the charter of the Library Company of Philadelphia created in 1731 by Franklin.

Originally, the books were kept in the homes of the first librarians, but in 1739 the collection was moved to the second floor of the State House of Pennsylvania, now known as Independence Hall. In 1791, a new building was built specifically for the library. The Library Company flourished with no competition and gained many priceless collections from bibliophiles such as James Logan and his physician brother William. The Library Company is now a great scholarly and research library with 500,000 rare books, pamphlets, and broadsides, more than 160,000 manuscripts, and 75,000 graphic items.

Upon Denham's death, Franklin returned to his former trade. By 1730, Franklin had set up a printing house of his own and had contrived to become the publisher of a newspaper called The Pennsylvania Gazette. The Gazette gave Franklin a forum for agitation about a variety of local reforms and initiatives through printed essays and observations. Over time, his commentary, together with a great deal of savvy about cultivating a positive image of an industrious and intellectual young man, earned him a great deal of social respect; though even after Franklin had achieved fame as a scientist and statesman, he habitually signed his letters with the unpretentious 'B. Franklin, Printer.'[3]

In 1731, Franklin was initiated into the local Freemason lodge, becoming a grand master in 1734, indicating his rapid rise to prominence in Pennsylvania.[4][5] That same year, he edited and published the first Masonic book in the Americas, a reprint of James Anderson's Constitutions of the Free-Masons. Franklin remained a Freemason throughout the rest of his life.[6][7]


Deborah Read
In 1724, while a boarder in the Read home, Franklin had courted Deborah Read before going to London at Governor Keith's request. At that time, Miss Read's mother was wary of allowing her daughter to wed a seventeen-year old who was on his way to London. Her own husband having recently died, Mrs. Read declined Franklin's offer of marriage.[3]

While Franklin was in London, Deborah married a man named John Rodgers. This proved to be a regrettable decision. Rodgers shortly avoided his debts and prosecution by fleeing to Barbados, leaving Deborah behind. With Rodgers' fate unknown, and bigamy illegal, Deborah was not free to formally remarry.

In 1730, Franklin acknowledged an illegitimate son named William, who would eventually become the last Loyalist governor of New Jersey. While the identity of William's mother remains unknown, perhaps the responsibility of an infant child gave Franklin a reason to take up residence with Deborah Read. William was raised in the Franklin household but eventually broke with his father over the treatment of the colonies at the hands of the crown. However, he was not above using his father's fame to enhance his own standing.
Franklin established a common-law marriage with Deborah Read on September 1, 1730. In addition to raising William, Benjamin and Deborah Franklin had two children together. The first, Francis Folger Franklin, born October 1732, died of smallpox in 1736. Sarah Franklin, nicknamed Sally, was born in 1743. She eventually married Richard Bache, had seven children, and cared for her father in his old age.
Deborah's fear of the sea meant that she never accompanied Franklin on any of his extended trips to Europe, despite his repeated requests.

Success as author
In 1733, Franklin began to publish the famous Poor Richard's Almanack (with content both original and borrowed) under the pseudonym Richard Saunders, on which much of his popular reputation is based. Franklin frequently wrote under pseudonyms. Although it was no secret that Franklin was the author, his Richard Saunders character repeatedly denied it. "Poor Richard's Proverbs," adages from this almanac, such as "A penny saved is twopence dear" (often misquoted as "A penny saved is a penny earned"), "Fish and visitors stink in three days" remain common quotations in the modern world. Wisdom in folk society meant the ability to provide an apt adage for any occasion, and Franklin's readers became well prepared. He sold about ten thousand copies per year (a circulation equal to nearly three million today).[3]

In 1758, the year in which he ceased writing for the Almanack, he printed Father Abraham's Sermon, also known as The Way to Wealth. Franklin's autobiography, published after his death, has become one of the classics of the genre.

Inventions and scientific inquiries
Franklin was a prodigious inventor. Among his many creations were the lightning rod, the glass harmonica, the Franklin stove, bifocal glasses, and the flexible urinary catheter. Franklin never patented his inventions; in his autobiography he wrote, "... as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously."[8] His inventions also included social innovations, such as paying forward.

As deputy postmaster, Franklin became interested in the North Atlantic Ocean circulation patterns which carried mail ships. Franklin worked with Timothy Folger, his cousin and experienced Nantucket whaler captain, and other experienced ship captains, learning enough to chart the Gulf Stream, giving it the name by which it's still known today. It took many years for British sea captains to follow Franklin's advice on navigating the current, but once they did, they were able to gain two weeks in sailing time.[9][10]

In 1743, Franklin founded the American Philosophical Society to help scientific men discuss their discoveries and theories. He began the electrical research that, along with other scientific inquiries, would occupy him for the rest of his life, in between bouts of politics and moneymaking.[3]

In 1748, he retired from printing and went into other businesses. He created a partnership with his foreman, David Hall, which provided Franklin with half of the shop's profits for 18 years. This lucrative business arrangement provided leisure time for study, and in a few years he had made discoveries that gave him a reputation with the educated throughout Europe and especially in France.

His discoveries included his investigations of electricity. Franklin proposed that "vitreous" and "resinous" electricity were not different types of "electrical fluid" (as electricity was called then), but the same electrical fluid under different pressures. He was the first to label them as positive and negative respectively,[11] and he was the first to discover the principle of conservation of charge.[12] In 1750, he published a proposal for an experiment to prove that lightning is electricity by flying a kite in a storm that appeared capable of becoming a lightning storm. On May 10, 1752, Thomas-François Dalibard of France conducted Franklin's experiment (using a 40-foot-tall iron rod instead of a kite) and extracted electrical sparks from a cloud. On June 15, Franklin may have possibly conducted his famous kite experiment in Philadelphia and also successfully extracted sparks from a cloud, although there are theories that suggest he never performed the experiment. Franklin's experiment was not written up until Joseph Priestley's 1767 History and Present Status of Electricity; the evidence shows that Franklin was insulated (not in a conducting path, since he would have been in danger of electrocution in the event of a lightning strike). (Others, such as Prof. Georg Wilhelm Richmann of Saint Petersburg, Russia, were electrocuted during the months following Franklin's experiment.) In his writings, Franklin indicates that he was aware of the dangers and offered alternative ways to demonstrate that lightning was electrical, as shown by his use of the concept of electrical ground. If Franklin did perform this experiment, he did not do it in the way that is often described, flying the kite and waiting to be struck by lightning, as it would have been fatal.[13] Instead, he used the kite to collect some electric charge from a storm cloud, which implied that lightning was electrical.
On October 19 in a letter to England explaining directions for repeating the experiment, Franklin wrote:
"When rain has wet the kite twine so that it can conduct the electric fire freely, you will find it streams out plentifully from the key at the approach of your knuckle, and with this key a phial, or Leiden jar, maybe charged: and from electric fire thus obtained spirits may be kindled, and all other electric experiments [may be] performed which are usually done by the help of a rubber glass globe or tube; and therefore the sameness of the electrical matter with that of lightening completely demonstrated.

Franklin's electrical experiments led to his invention of the lightning rod. He noted that conductors with a sharp rather than a smooth point were capable of discharging silently, and at a far greater distance. He surmised that this knowledge could be of use in protecting buildings from lightning, by attaching "upright Rods of Iron, made sharp as a Needle and gilt to prevent Rusting, and from the Foot of those Rods a Wire down the outside of the Building into the Ground;...Would not these pointed Rods probably draw the Electrical Fire silently out of a Cloud before it came nigh enough to strike, and thereby secure us from that most sudden and terrible Mischief!" Following a series of experiments on Franklin's own house, lightning rods were installed on the Academy of Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania) and the Pennsylvania State House (later Independence Hall) in 1752.

In recognition of his work with electricity, Franklin received the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 1753, and in 1756 he became one of the few eighteenth century Americans to be elected as a Fellow of the Society. The cgs unit of electric charge has been named after him: one franklin (Fr) is equal to one statcoulomb.

On October 21, 1743, according to popular myth, a storm moving from the southwest denied Franklin the opportunity of witnessing a lunar eclipse. Franklin was said to have noted that the prevailing winds were actually from the northeast, contrary to what he had expected. In correspondence with his brother, Franklin learned that the same storm had not reached Boston until after the eclipse, despite the fact that Boston is to the northeast of Philadelphia. He deduced that storms do not always travel in the direction of the prevailing wind, a concept which would have great influence in meteorology.

Franklin noted a principle of refrigeration by observing that on a very hot day, he stayed cooler in a wet shirt in a breeze than he did in a dry one. To understand this phenomenon more clearly Franklin conducted experiments. On one warm day in Cambridge, England, in 1758, Franklin and fellow scientist John Hadley experimented by continually wetting the ball of a mercury thermometer with ether and using bellows to evaporate the ether. With each subsequent evaporation, the thermometer read a lower temperature, eventually reaching 7 °F (-14 °C). Another thermometer showed the room temperature to be constant at 65 °F (18 °C). In his letter "Cooling by Evaporation," Franklin noted that "one may see the possibility of freezing a man to death on a warm summer’s day."

Musical endeavors
Franklin is known to have played the violin, the harp, and the guitar. He also composed music, notably a string quartet in early classical style, and invented a much-improved version of the glass harmonica, in which each glass was made to rotate on its own, with the player's fingers held steady, instead of the other way around; this version soon found its way to Europe.

Public life
In 1736, Franklin created the Union Fire Company, one of the first volunteer fire fighting companies in America. In the same year, he printed a new currency for New Jersey based on innovative anti-counterfeiting techniques which he had devised.

As he matured, Franklin began to concern himself more with public affairs. In 1743, he set forth a scheme for The Academy and College of Philadelphia. He was appointed president of the academy in November 13, 1749, and it opened on August 13, 1751. At its first commencement, on May 17, 1757, seven men graduated; six with a Bachelor of Arts and one as Master of Arts. It was later merged with the University of the State of Pennsylvania to become the University of Pennsylvania.

In 1753, both Harvard and Yale awarded him honorary degrees.

In 1751, Franklin and Dr. Thomas Bond obtained a charter from the Pennsylvania legislature to establish a hospital. Pennsylvania Hospital was the first hospital in what was to become the United States of America.
Franklin became involved in Philadelphia politics and rapidly progressed. In October 1748, he was selected as a councilman, in June 1749 he became a Justice of the Peace for Philadelphia, and in 1751 he was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly. On August 10, 1753, Franklin was appointed joint deputy postmaster-general of North America. His most notable service in domestic politics was his reform of the postal system, but his fame as a statesman rests chiefly on his subsequent diplomatic services in connection with the relations of the colonies with Great Britain, and later with France.

In 1754, he headed the Pennsylvania delegation to the Albany Congress. This meeting of several colonies had been requested by the Board of Trade in England to improve relations with the Indians and defense against the French. Franklin proposed a broad Plan of Union for the colonies. While the plan was not adopted, elements of it found their way into the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution.

In 1757, he was sent to England by the Pennsylvania Assembly as a colonial agent to protest against the political influence of the Penn family, the proprietors of the colony. He remained there for five years, striving to end the proprietors' prerogative to overturn legislation from the elected Assembly, and their exemption from paying taxes on their land. His lack of influential allies in Whitehall led to the failure of this mission. In 1759, the University of St Andrews awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree. In 1762, Oxford University awarded Franklin an honorary doctorate for his scientific accomplishments and from then on he went by "Doctor Franklin." He also managed to secure a post for his illegitimate son, William Franklin, as Colonial Governor of New Jersey.

In 1756, Franklin became a member of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (now Royal Society of Arts or RSA, which had been founded in 1754), whose early meetings took place in coffee shops in London's Covent Garden district, close to Franklin's main residence in Craven Street (the only one of his residences to survive and which opened to the public as the Benjamin Franklin House museum on January 17, 2006). After his return to America, Franklin became the Society's Corresponding Member and remained closely connected with the Society. The RSA instituted a Benjamin Franklin Medal in 1956 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Franklin's birth and the 200th anniversary of his membership of the RSA.
In 1759, he visited Edinburgh with his son, and recalled his conversations there as "the densest happiness of my life."

Coming of Revolution
In 1763, soon after Franklin returned to Pennsylvania, the western frontier was engulfed in a bitter war known as Pontiac's Rebellion. The Paxton Boys, a group of settlers convinced that the Pennsylvania government was not doing enough to protect them from American Indian raids, murdered a group of peaceful Susquehannock Indians and then marched on Philadelphia. Franklin helped to organize the local militia in order to defend the capital against the mob, and then met with the Paxton leaders and persuaded them to disperse. Franklin wrote a scathing attack against the racial prejudice of the Paxton Boys. "If an Indian injures me," he asked, "does it follow that I may revenge that Injury on all Indians?"

At this time, many members of the Pennsylvania Assembly were feuding with William Penn's heirs, who controlled the colony as proprietors. Franklin led the "anti-proprietary party" in the struggle against the Penn family, and was elected Speaker of the Pennsylvania House in May 1764. His call for a change from proprietary to royal government was a rare political miscalculation, however: Pennsylvanians worried that such a move would endanger their political and religious freedoms. Because of these fears, and because of political attacks on his character, Franklin lost his seat in the October 1764 Assembly elections. The anti-proprietary party dispatched Franklin to England to continue the struggle against the Penn family proprietorship, but during this visit, events would drastically change the nature of his mission.[21]

In London, Franklin opposed the 1765 Stamp Act, but when he was unable to prevent its passage, he made another political miscalculation and recommended a friend to the post of stamp distributor for Pennsylvania. Pennsylvanians were outraged, believing that he had supported the measure all along, and threatened to destroy his home in Philadelphia. Franklin soon learned of the extent of colonial resistance to the Stamp Act, and his testimony before the House of Commons led to its repeal. With this, Franklin suddenly emerged as the leading spokesman for American interests in England. He wrote popular essays on behalf of the colonies, and Georgia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts also appointed him as their agent to the Crown.

Franklin in 1783, an engraving from a painting by Joseph Duplessis.In September 1767, Franklin
Franklin visited Paris with his usual traveling partner, Sir John Pringle. News of his electrical discoveries was widespread in France. His reputation meant that he was introduced to many influential scientists and politicians, and also to King Louis XV.

While living in London in 1768, he developed a phonetic alphabet in A Scheme for a new Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling. This reformed alphabet discarded six letters Franklin regarded as redundant (c, j, q, w, x and y), and substituted six new letters for sounds he felt lacked letters of their own. His new alphabet, however, never caught on and he eventually lost interest.

In 1771, Franklin traveled extensively around the British Isles staying with, among others, Joseph Priestley and David Hume. In Dublin, Franklin was invited to sit with the members of the Irish Parliament rather than in the gallery. He was the first American to be given this honor. While touring Ireland, he was moved by the level of poverty he saw. Ireland's economy was affected by the same trade regulations and laws of England which governed America. Franklin feared that America could suffer the same effects should Britain’s colonial exploitation continue.

In 1773, Franklin published two of his most celebrated pro-American satirical essays: Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One, and An Edict by the King of Prussia.[26] He also published an Abridgment of the Book of Common Prayer, anonymously with Francis Dashwood. Among the unusual features of this work is a funeral service reduced to six minutes in length, "to preserve the health and lives of the living."[22]
Ambassador to France: 1776-1785
In December 1776, Franklin was dispatched to France as commissioner for the United States. He lived in a home in the Parisian suburb of Passy, donated by Jacques-Donatien Le Ray de Chaumont who supported the United States. Franklin remained in France until 1785, and was such a favorite of French society that it became fashionable for wealthy French families to decorate their parlors with a painting of him. He was highly flirtatious in the French manner (but did not have any actual affairs). He conducted the affairs of his country towards the French nation with great success, which included securing a critical military alliance in 1778 and negotiating the Treaty of Paris (1783). During his stay in France, Benjamin Franklin as a freemason was Grand Master of the Lodge Les Neuf Sœurs from 1779 until 1781. His number was 24 in the Lodge. He was also a Past Grand Master of Pennsylvania. In 1784, when Franz Mesmer began to publicize his theory of "animal magnetism", which was considered offensive by many, Louis XVI appointed a commission to investigate it. These included the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, the physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, the astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly and Benjamin Franklin.


Constitutional Convention
When he finally returned home in 1785, Franklin occupied a position only second to that of George Washington as the champion of American independence. Le Ray honored him with a commissioned portrait painted by Joseph Duplessis that now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. After his return, Franklin became an abolitionist, freeing both of his slaves. He eventually became president of Pennsylvania Abolition Society.[29]

In 1787, Franklin served as a delegate to the Philadelphia Convention. He held an honorific position and seldom engaged in debate. He is the only Founding Father who is a signatory of all four of the major documents of the founding of the United States: the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, the Treaty of Alliance with France, and the United States Constitution.

In 1787, a group of prominent ministers in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, proposed the foundation of a new college to be named in Franklin's honor. Franklin donated £200 towards the development of Franklin College, which is now called Franklin & Marshall College.

Between 1771 and 1788, he finished his autobiography. While it was at first addressed to his son, it was later completed for the benefit of mankind at the request of a friend.

President of Pennsylvania
Special balloting conducted 18 November 1785 unanimously elected Franklin the sixth President of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania, replacing John Dickinson. The office of President of Pennsylvania was analogous to the modern position of Governor. It is not clear why Dickinson needed to be replaced with less than two weeks remaining before the regular election. Franklin held that office for slightly over three years, longer than any other, and served the Constitutional limit of three full terms. Shortly after his initial election he was re-elected to a full term on 29 October 1785, and again in the fall of 1786 and on 31 October 1787. Officially, his term concluded on 5 November 1788, but there is some question regarding the de facto end of his term, suggesting that the aging Franklin may not have been actively involved in the day-to-day operation of the Council toward the end of his time in office.


Virtue, religion and personal beliefs
Like the other advocates of republicanism, Franklin emphasized that the new republic could survive only if the people were virtuous in the sense of attention to civic duty and rejection of corruption. All his life he had been exploring the role of civic and personal virtue, as expressed in Poor Richard's aphorisms.

Although Franklin's parents had intended for him to have a career in the church, Franklin became disillusioned with organized religion after discovering Deism. "I soon became a thorough Deist."[30] He went on to attack Christian principles of free will and morality in a 1725 pamphlet, A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain.[31] He consistently attacked religious dogma, arguing that morality was more dependent upon virtue and benevolent actions than on strict obedience to religious orthodoxy: "I think opinions should be judged by their influences and effects; and if a man holds none that tend to make him less virtuous or more vicious, it may be concluded that he holds none that are dangerous, which I hope is the case with me."

A few years later, Franklin repudiated his 1725 pamphlet as an embarrassing "erratum." In 1790, just about a month before he died, Franklin wrote the following in a letter to Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, who had asked him his views on religion:

“ As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupt changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his divinity; tho' it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and I think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble....[3] ”

Like most Enlightenment intellectuals, Franklin separated virtue, morality, and faith from organized religion, although he felt that if religion in general grew weaker, morality, virtue, and society in general would also decline. Thus he wrote Thomas Paine, "If men are so wicked with religion, what would they be if without it." According to David Morgan,[32] Franklin was a proponent of all religions. He prayed to "Powerful Goodness" and referred to God as the "INFINITE." John Adams noted that Franklin was a mirror in which people saw their own religion: "The Catholics thought him almost a Catholic. The Church of England claimed him as one of them. The Presbyterians thought him half a Presbyterian, and the Friends believed him a wet Quaker." Whatever else Benjamin Franklin was, concludes Morgan, "he was a true champion of generic religion." Ben Franklin was noted to be "the spirit of the Enlightenment."

Walter Isaacson argues[33] that Franklin became uncomfortable with an unenhanced version of deism and came up with his own conception of the Creator. Franklin outlined his concept of deity in 1728, in his Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion.[34] From this, Isaacson compares Franklin's conception of deity to that of strict deists and orthodox Christians. He concludes that unlike most pure deists, Franklin believed that a faith in God should inform our daily actions, but that, like other deists, his faith was devoid of sectarian dogma. Isaacson also discusses Franklin's conception that God had created beings who do interfere in wordly matters, a point that has led some commentators, most notably A. Owen Aldridge, to read Franklin as embracing some sort of polytheism, with a bevy of lesser gods overseeing various realms and planets.

On July 4, 1776, Congress appointed a committee that included Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams to design the Great Seal of the United States.[35] Each member of the committee proposed a unique design: Franklin's proposal featured a design with the motto: "Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God." This design was to portray a scene from the Book of Exodus, complete with Moses, the Israelites, the pillar of fire, and George III depicted as Pharaoh.[36]

At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, when the convention seemed headed for disaster due to a vitriolic debate, the elderly Franklin recalled the days of the Revolutionary War, when the American leaders assembled in prayer daily, seeking "divine guidance" from the "Father of lights." He then rhetorically asked,

“ And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? Or do we imagine that we no longer need his assistance?... I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth - that God Governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?
We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings, that "except the Lord build the House, they labor in vain that build it." I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without his concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel: We shall be divided by our partial local interests; our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and bye word down to future ages. And what is worse, mankind may hereafter from this unfortunate instance, despair of establishing Governments by Human wisdom and leave it to chance, war and conquest. I therefore beg leave to move - that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessing on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the clergy of this city be requested to officiate in that service.[37]
”

Franklin may have financially supported one particular Presbyterian group in Philadelphia.[38] According to the epitaph Franklin wrote for himself at the age of twenty, it is clear that he believed in a physical resurrection of the body some time after death. Franklin's actual grave, however, as he specified in his final will, simply reads "Benjamin and Deborah Franklin."[39]

Virtue
Franklin sought to cultivate his character by a plan of thirteen virtues, which he developed at age 20 (in 1726) and continued to practice in some form for the rest of his life. His autobiography (see references below) lists his thirteen virtues as:

"TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation."
"SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation."
"ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time."
"RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve."
"FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing."
"INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions."
"SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly."
"JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty."
"MODERATION. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve."
"CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation."
"TRANQUILLITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable."
"CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation."
"HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates."

Death and legacy
Franklin died on April 17, 1790, at age 84. His funeral was attended by approximately 20,000 people. He was interred in Christ Church Burial Ground in Philadelphia. In 1728, as a young man, Franklin wrote what he hoped would be his own epitaph:

The Body of B. Franklin Printer; Like the Cover of an old Book, Its Contents torn out, And stript of its Lettering and Gilding, Lies here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be wholly lost: For it will, as he believ'd, appear once more, In a new & more perfect Edition, Corrected and Amended By the Author.[40]

Franklin's actual grave, however, as he specified in his final will, simply reads "Benjamin and Deborah Franklin."[41]

In 1773, when Franklin's work had moved from printing to science and politics, he corresponded with a French scientist on the subject of preserving the dead for later revival by more advanced scientific methods, writing:

I should prefer to an ordinary death, being immersed with a few friends in a cask of Madeira, until that time, then to be recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country! But in all probability, we live in a century too little advanced, and too near the infancy of science, to see such an art brought in our time to its perfection.[42] (Extended excerpt also online.)[43]

His death is described in the book The Life of Benjamin Franklin, quoting from the account of Dr. John Jones:

...when the pain and difficulty of breathing entirely left him, and his family were flattering themselves with the hopes of his recovery, when an imposthume, which had formed itself in his lungs, suddenly burst, and discharged a quantity of matter, which he continued to throw up while he had power; but, as that failed, the organs of respiration became gradually oppressed; a calm, lethargic state succeeded; and on the 17th instant (April, 1790), about eleven o'clock at night, he quietly expired, closing a long and useful life of eighty-four years and three months.[44]

Franklin bequeathed £1,000 (about $4,400 at the time) each to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia, in trust to gather interest for 200 years. The trust began in 1785 when a French mathematician named Charles-Joseph Mathon de la Cour wrote a parody of Franklin's "Poor Richard's Almanack" called "Fortunate Richard." Mocking the unbearable spirit of American optimism represented by Franklin, the Frenchman wrote that Fortunate Richard left a small sum of money in his will to be used only after it had collected interest for 500 years. Franklin, who was 79 years old at the time, wrote to the Frenchman, thanking him for a great idea and telling him that he had decided to leave a bequest of 1,000 pounds each to his native Boston and his adopted Philadelphia. As of 1990, more than $2,000,000 had accumulated in Franklin's Philadelphia trust, which had loaned the money to local residents. From 1940 to 1990, the money was used mostly for mortgage loans. When the trust came due, Philadelphia decided to spend it on scholarships for local high school students. Franklin's Boston trust fund accumulated almost $5,000,000 during that same time, and was used to establish a trade school that became the Franklin Institute of Boston.[45]

Franklin's likeness is ubiquitous. Since 1928, it has adorned American $100 bills, which are sometimes referred to in slang as "Benjamins" or "Franklins." From 1948 to 1964, Franklin's portrait was on the half dollar. He has appeared on a $50 bill and on several varieties of the $100 bill from 1914 and 1918. Franklin appears on the $1,000 Series EE Savings bond. The city of Philadelphia contains around 5,000 likenesses of Benjamin Franklin, about half of which are located on the University of Pennsylvania campus. Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin .