Autobiografía

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was, "avant la lettre", the American representative man who could have figured in Emerson's illustrious gallery of literary portraits. Franklin, an inhabitant of the English colonies, witnessed, and almost sealed with a celebrated speech, the birth of the United States as the first modern democracy, requesting the unanimous recommendation of the American Constitution from the other delegates of the Federal Convention gathered in Philadelphia. Franklin's writing, however, has its roots in Puritan ethics, whose powerful and brilliant imagination had given birth to one of his favorite readings, John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress". A spiritual descendant of those "Pilgrim Fathers", the indefatigable and multifaceted Franklin transmitted to his era in the text of his "Autobiography" the need to continue cultivating an ethics that would not neglect the classical and Judeo-Christian sources of our culture ("Imitate Jesus and Socrates"), in view of the opportunities offered by life in the New World. Franklin's "Autobiography", full of anecdotes and lessons from his long life, unfinished by definition, like the world in which it had been conceived, begun as a letter to his son and continued as a testimony to his fellow citizens, retains all the promissory value of the fundamental texts of the American tradition.