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BE N JA M I N F R A N K L I N ' S AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND THE C R E D I B I L I T Y OF P E RSON A L I T Y JENNIFER JORDAN BAKER Vassar College fter reading the first installment of Benjamin Franklin's memoirs, Benjamin Vaughan concluded that his friend's life story would offer a fitting paradigm of American upward social mobility. ``All that has happened to you,'' he wrote to Franklin in 1783, is ``connected with the detail of the manners and situation of a rising people'' (Autobiography 59). Vaughan's insistence that Franklin's was a prototypical story of success and self-making suggested that the memoir was representative of the American experience. While the limitations of this prototype are clear to the modern reader--Vaughan spoke specifically of a ``rising people'' of Euro-American males with access to economic opportunities not available to others--critics have recognized nonetheless a presumption of representativeness in this text. In the words of Mitchell Breitwieser, Franklin ``aspires to representative personal universality,'' creating a rhetorical personality by cultivating ``characteristics he felt were in accord with what the age demanded'' (Breitwieser 171). Franklin's Autobiography, according to William Spengemann,
Early American Literature – University of North Carolina Press
Published: Nov 1, 2000
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