Franklin's Autobiography is the only enduring best-seller written inAmerica before the nineteenth century, as well as the most popularautobiography ever written.As such it deserves to be offered to twentieth-century readers in themost accurate form possible, and so it is, in this Norton CriticalEdition, the first text to be edited directly from the manuscripts,rather than perpetuating the errors of previous editions.The text is fully annotated, and the reading is assisted by helpfulfootnotes, biographical sketches, and two maps.In "Backgrounds", the editors collect Franklin's most importantreflections on the Autobiography's purpose, some anecdotes, and anumber of Franklin's statements on wealth, the art of virtue, andperfection.  Materials in "Criticism" range from contemporaryopinions--which reveal that readers were divided then as they are nowabout the art of the Autobiography--to essays written in the twentiethcentury.Nineteenth-century opinions include those of John Keats, Edgar AllenPoe, Mark Twain, and William Dean Howells, among others.The twentieth-century materials include D. H. Lawrence's celebratedessay, an excerpt from Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit ofCapitalism, and the perspectives of such recent critics as Charles L.Sanford, Robert Freeman Sayre, John William Ward, and David Devin.