Author
Benjamin Franklin is documented in Fuller’s letters, published essays, and reading notebooks (1836–1845). No work is named in the surviving passages, most often in Letter to unknown, and the most intensive engagement recorded is “excerpted”.
Reprints, Memoirs passages, and repeat notes within a single manuscript are shown but never counted twice. Evidence for this author is selective, not exhaustive. Methodology →
“By hearing him often" says Franklin, "I came to distinguish easily between sermons newly composed, and those which he had often preached in the course of his travels. His delivery of the latter was so improved by frequent repetition, that every accent, every emphasis, every modulation of voice was so perfectly well learned [...]”
This page brings together documented engagements currently identified within the Fuller Reading Worlds catalog.
Selected passages from Fuller’s own writings, in chronological order.
“By hearing him often" says Franklin, "I came to distinguish easily between sermons newly composed, and those which he had often preached in the course of his travels.”
Fuller, Margaret. "Notebook: Bouquet, 1836–1837." Houghton Library, Harvard University; bMS Am 1086 (43); Box 6 (43).
“Among men there is Franklin! he is a fact, and an American fact. Niagara is another, in a different style.”
Fuller, Margaret. "‘American Facts.’." New-York Daily Tribune, 19 May 1845. · 19 May 1845
Undated
Pieces with no legible date. They are part of the record but cannot be placed on the lifeline.
“Had I but been educated in the Knowledge of such men as Jefferson, Franklin, Rush:- I have learned now to know them particularly.”
Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. VI. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Inferred Fuller names Franklin alongside Jefferson and Rush as a founding figure she has studied. Franklin's Autobiography (substantially published in English in 1793) was widely circulated in the 19th century and represents the most likely reading, though Fuller names no specific title.