:Benjamin Franklin is famous in the

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Benjamin Franklin is famous in the history of the United States because of his many and varied accomplishments later in his life, as a brilliant diplomat, as a scientist, as an inventor, as a philosopher, and as a public official. Early in his life, however, he was headed for a career as a printer. He was apprenticed at the age of twelve in a print shop that belonged to his half-brother James. When faced with the unhappy prospect of spending nine years in an intolerable situation, Benjamin devised a way to get out of his contract as an apprentice printer in a rather unusual and creative way.
Benjamin’s half-brother James ran a weekly newspaper, the New-England Courant, and it was in this paper that young Benjamin worked as an apprentice printer. Unbeknownst to his half- brother James, who owned the paper, a very young Benjamin wrote a series of humorous letters to the paper. He did not sign his own name to these letters. Instead, he used the pseudonym Mrs. Silence Dogwood. In these letters he mocked the life around Boston. The letters amused the paper’s readers, but they did not have the same effect on city officials.
As a result of the letters, city officials forbade James to publish his newspaper. James then decided to continue printing the paper using Benjamin’s name rather his own; in order to do this, however, James had to release Benjamin from his contract as an apprentice. After all, a newspaper could not be headed by an apprentice printer. After James had released Benjamin from his apprenticeship, he was to discover that Benjamin had written the letters that had caused so much trouble. He was angry that he had lost the right to publish his paper because of Benjamin. On his part, Benjamin was delighted to have been released from his contract as an apprentice.
Later in his life, after he had achieved success in so many varied fields of endeavor, Ben Franklin did admit that he had not handled his dissatisfaction with his apprenticeship in the most mature way. However, he still. appreciated the creative way that he had dealt with the problem.