Benjamin Franklin Established the Model

Benjamin Franklin Established the Model for the American Self-Made Man in His

Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of our country and the first to make of his own life history an American best seller, set the standards for the modern self-made man. His Autobiography shows a man who found the best means to develop himself intellectually and use all the knowledge he gained to serve his fellow people in the purest sense of the capitalism. Max Weber and DH Lawrence were two of the numerous attackers of his pragmatism, but despite all those who found faults in his virtues, he stands as the symbol for a life achievement through hard work and trust in the American dream.

Compared to Franklin, Rip Van Winkle, the main character in the short story written by Washington Irving, is an idealistic person who although most beloved by those around him, except his wife, never does anything out of the pure drive to make life for him and those around him materialistically better. He is described as a man whose hart was made of gold, but only in the eyes of those near him. His greatest fault is found in: "an insuperable aversion in all kinds of profitable labour" (Irving, 10). Unlike Franklin, Rip Van Winkle is like a character on many stories of the popular wisdom: he ccould help anybody who asked his help, but himself. That will make him go up into the mountains and sleep there for twenty years, only to return to his idyllic village that went through a major transformation: lived the through the days of the Great American Revolution. The Revolution was made by those people who could first help themselves in order to help the rest of the world, like the founding fathers.

Another American hero, Henry D. Thoreau, can also be easily pinpointed as a self-made man, in the spirit of Benjamin Franklin. His personality was disputed among those who saw in him more of a passive militant for a cause, than an active player, like the Franklin. There is no doubt that he stepped away from the forms of passivity in the form described by Irving in his character, Rip Van Winkle. Like his predecessor, Thoreau read extensively and understood the value of knowledge as the only and best way to developing one's identity and contributing to the whole development of society.