The biography details the life of Benjamin Franklin, a prominent figure in American history. Franklin was known for his diverse array of talents and interests, which included writing, science, invention, politics, and diplomacy. As one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, he played a key role in the drafting and signing of the United States Declaration of Independence, as well as serving as the country's first Postmaster General. The book explores Franklin's early life, his rise to prominence as a printer and writer, his experiments and discoveries in science, his political and diplomatic career, and his legacy as a statesman and philosopher.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.

This three-volume bibliography of printing, published 1880-6, quickly became a classic reference work, and is still of value today.

As Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens straddled the conflicts between culture and commerce that characterized the era he named the Gilded Age. In "Littery Man", Richard Lowry examines how Twain used these conflicts in his major texts to fashion an "autobiography of authorship," a narrative of his own claims to literary authority at that moment when the American Writer emerged as a profession. Drawing on wide range of cultural genres--popular boys' fiction, childbearing manuals, travel narratives, autobiography, and criticism and fiction of the period--Lowry reconstructs how Twain participated in remaking the "literary" into a powerful social category of representation. He shows how, as one of our cultures first modern celebrities, Samuel Clemens transformed his life into the artful performance we have come to know as Mark Twain, and his texts into a searching critique of modern identity in a mass-mediated society. "Littery Man" will appeal to both Twain scholars and to scholars and students of nineteenth-century American literature and culture.