Even late in life, after he had become one of the most famous people in Europe and North America, Benjamin Franklin continued to sign himself in letters as “B. Franklin, printer.” Over the years, Franklin's Autobiography has seemed to many readers to be an analogue to that signature: a simple, unpretentious, and straightforward statement of Franklin's identity. Indeed, Franklin wrote the narrative in a plain style that may have encouraged oversimplified readings. He wrote in unaffected prose, included amusing anecdotes, and admitted to youthful shortcomings and wrong turns, which he called errata, using the printer's term for errors. His Autobiography displays Franklin's knack for painting a portrait in words, such as the moment when the seventeen-year-old Franklin arrived in Philadelphia and purchased three huge “puffy rolls” with his last few pennies. Indeed, Franklin's Autobiography offered iconic pictures that eventually entered American folklore.

Franklin's unadorned prose, iconic pictures, details of his everyday life, and sense of humor have led many readers to see a relatively simple person or idea behind the narrative of the Autobiography. Max Weber saw in him the incarnation of the spirit of capitalism. D. H. Lawrence saw an unemotional automaton. Others found the original “self-made man.” Yet, then and now, the meaning of Franklin's memoir has been more slippery, more difficult to grasp, than many of those interpretations would admit. We are still learning how to read the Autobiography, Franklin's signature text, more than two centuries after he wrote it. The difficulties begin with the physical text itself.