Franklin's Concept of Reason in The Autobiography

Written in the form of a letter to his illegitimate son William, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography remains one of the classics of the genre and the first American book to be taken seriously by Europeans as literature. As a work produced by an enlightened representative under the influence of the American Enlightenment, The Autobiography reflects many elements of this great movement: empiricism, deism, religious tolerance, moral philosophy, economic liberalism, republicanism, revolutionary utopianism, and so forth. However, these disparate elements interact in this work in a way that attempts to redefine the meaning of human reason.