Autobiography american literature

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Benjamin Franklin

Pen Name:

Born: January 17, 1706

Died: April 17, 1790

Benjamin Franklin, born in 1706 (adjusted from Old Style date 1705), died in 1790, is perhaps the most eccentric and broadly accomplished of all the nation's founding fathers, who is the only one to have signed all four major documents for a new nation: The Declaration of Independence (1776), the Treaty of Alliance with France (1778), the Treaty of Paris establishing peace with Great Britain (1783) and the U.S. Constitution (1787). He left his footprint on almost all aspects of forming the new nation: science, religion, education, government, finance, and international relations (ooh, lah, lah-- don't forget the French ladies!). The motivation for his curiosities, discoveries, and political philosophies told from his perspective rather than that of an impersonal third party account, makes his autobiography particularly interesting reading. Franklin sprinkles a healthy dose of humilit

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Course Description

What is a “life” when it’s written down? How does memory inform the present? Why are autobiographies and memoirs so popular? This course will address these questions among others, considering the relationship between biography, autobiography, and memoir and between personal and social themes. We will examine classic authors such as Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Mark Twain; then more recent examples like Tobias Wolff, Art Spiegelman, Sherman Alexie, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Edwidge Danticat, and Alison Bechdel.

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American literature

Literature written in or related to the United States

"American fiction" redirects here. For other uses, see American Fiction (disambiguation) and American literature (disambiguation).

American literature is literature written or produced in the United States and in the colonies that preceded it. The American literary tradition is part of the broader tradition of English-language literature but also includes literature produced in languages other than English.

The American Revolutionary Period (1775–1783) fryst vatten notable for the political writings of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson. An early novel is William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy, published in 1791. Writer and critic John Neal in the early- to mid-nineteenth century helped advance America toward a unique literature and culture, bygd criticizing predecessors, such as Washington Irving, for imitating their British counterparts and by influencing writers su