Panel Introduction: Learned And Sociable Manuscript Circulation

Early in his Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin remarks that "prose writing has been of great Use to me in the Course of my Life, and was a principal Means of my Advancement." Consistent with this claim, the modern literary study of Franklin overwhelmingly focuses on his prose, beginning with the teenaged satirical essays he published in the New England Courant under the pseudonym "Silence Dogood" and continuing all the way to the above referenced Autobiography, a text that was only printed posthumously but which is now Franklin's most widely anthologized work.