of moral regeneration, and of social progress. Even those who have never read the book know something of Franklin’s account of his rise to riches, of how he acquired habits of, and a reputation for, moderation, industry, and probity. Fascinated by the shaping power of biology and nurture, he implies that he inherited these virtues from his family of English Dissenters. For example, he relates that his father, Josiah, discoursed so entertainingly at dinner that he paid little attention to his food, giving rise to a lifelong habit of temperance. During his first voyage to England he supped on half an anchovy “on a very little Strip of Bread & Butter.” Shunning alcohol—whose ruinous effects on others’ lives the Autobiography repeatedly illustrates—and strengthening his arms by swimming, he gained physical and mental vitality, which fostered his related habit of industry. He not only worked hard but also arranged to be noticed doing so, sometimes buying printing paper and then conspicuously pushing it home in a wheelbarrow through the streets. He also established when young and then zealously guarded a reputation for honesty and good sense.

It is of course a familiar account, which reverberates throughout American history in such real careers as Andrew Carnegie’s and such fictional ones as Horatio Alger’s. Less familiar is the fact that Franklin also attributes his business success to his love of reading and writing. Arrived in Philadelphia, he befriended other young “Lovers of Reading”—the book’s most recurrent category for classifying human beings—and formed them into the Junto, a literary club that also provided business contacts. Having trained himself, remarkably, to write effectively as a child, he later won the attention of rich and important men by his writing ability, which together with his careful printing brought new business. In sum, by early middle age he had despite his humble origins secured a fortune substantial enough to afford him “Leisure during the rest of my Life, for Philosophical Studies and Amusements.”

The ideal of moral regeneration is dramatized starkly in the famous charts that open the second section of the Autobiography. Franklin had planned to elaborate this astonishing attempt to live “without committing any Fault at any time” in a treatise on “the ART of Virtue,” teaching the subject to youths as one might teach architecture or the piano. Had he written such a book it might today stand first in a long and continuing parade of American popular works on self-help and self-improvement. He had also hoped to found a “Sect” for initiates in his thirteen-week regime, to be called the “Society of the Free and Easy”—persons free from vice and debt, therefore easy in mind and spirit. His proposed “Sect” similarly recalls such later American attempts to develop a new secular religion as Emerson’s Transcendentalism, as well as the earlier Puritanism of Franklin’s native New England. The Puritans also sought moral regeneration, although through the supernatural transformation of one’s inner self wrought by the Holy Ghost. Franklin’s “Art of Virtue” was his naturalistic version of the divine grace of his Puritan forebears, differing from it crucially, however, in that he felt he might purify himself while they considered regeneration beyond one’s striving. Moreover, Franklin treats his “bold and arduous Project” with self-humor and admits its failure cheerfully. Like the arm-weary grinder he describes who at last preferred the speckled ax, he came to think it better not to be faultless, for the “extreme Nicety” he exacted of himself might seem to others ridiculous, and a perfect character, even if attainable, might be envied and hated.

In his devotion to the ideal of social progress Franklin again evinces his New England origins. According to the daily schedule he prepared, he began each morning by asking, “What Good shall I do this Day?” and concluded each evening, at ten o’clock, by asking, “What Good have I done to day?” His questions probably grew out of his adolescent acquaintance in Boston with the Puritan minister Cotton Mather (1663–1728), who also proposed to himself each day the performance of some specific good. Indeed Franklin acknowledged that Mather’s Bonifacius (1710), usually known as Essays to Do Good, had “an influence on my conduct through life.” But Franklin emphasized good works at the expense of faith to a degree Mather would have thought excessive. And Franklin’s humanitarian devotion to making life in society safer, less fractious, and more comfortable epitomizes the post-Puritan, Enlightenment ideal of the amicus humani generis, the friend of mankind.

As the Autobiography makes clear, Franklin owed many of his opportunities to Do Good, as he owed much of his business success, to the emergence of Philadelphia as the cultural and commercial center of Colonial America. From a population of about 10,000 in 1720, the city grew to 23,000 in 1750, and to 40,000 by 1776, when it was outranked in population among British cities only by London itself. Trade