Comparing William Bradford And Ben Franklin's Life

While William Bradford and Ben Franklin’s lives have some similarities, the two people’s writing styles were completely different. William Bradford was born in Austerfield, UK and held a Puritan life, therefore he had a Puritan writing style. Ben Franklin was born in Boston, Massachusetts and was born Puritan, but self-proclaimed himself as deist and had a classicism writing style.

Writings of the Puritan style illustrated their beliefs in order, hard work, education, and a God-centered community and society. Puritans believed that the nature of men was evil and that true wealth, the reward of a virutous life, was a gift from God. Their writing shows independence from England and English ideas. William Bradford was born in a small farming

community and by age twelve had taken to reading the Bible. At the age of eighteen he joined a group of Separists and fled from England in fear of persecution. He started writing about the history of the Plymouth Colony. As a Puritan, Bradford had a plain style of writing.

Classicism writings illustrated the forming of an American identity, structure, and philosophy. Deists believed nature and humanity are governed by a fixed system, reason is more important than imagination, and tradition is better than change. Ben Franklin was born in Boston, Massachusetts and began writing at the age of sixteen where he wrote letters to his brother’s newspaper and his brother published them. He posed as a middle-aged widow with funny and intelligent things to say. People suspected that she wasn’t who she said she was and were surprised to find that young Franklin wrote the letters. His writing does have some similarities to puritan writing, like he uses short declarative sentences, and that he comments on things like human nature in the middle of his stories. One of the key differences is that Ben Franklin does use a good deal of detail in his writing, something that the Puritans never really did. One other difference in Ben Franklin's writing that’s different from Bradford’s Puritan writing is the he does not reference God or acts of providence all of the time.

So while they both grew up Puritan and had similar writing, William Bradford stuck to his Puritan beliefs and Ben Franklin started in a new direction of deism.