Benjamin Franklin wrote his posthumously published memoir--a model of the genre--in several pieces and in different temporal and physical places. Douglas Anderson's study of this work reveals the famed inventor as a literary adept whose approach to autobiographical narrative was as innovative and radical as the inventions and political thought for which he is renowned.

Franklin never completed his autobiography, choosing instead to immerse his reader in the formal and textual atmosphere of a deliberately -unfinished- life. Taking this decision on Franklin's part as a starting point,...