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Authors
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
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The Papers of Benjamin Franklin are being published by Yale University Press, which in 2002 brought out Edmund S. Morgan’s biography, Benjamin Franklin. A good selection of Franklin’s writings may be found in Benjamin Franklin: Representative Selection (1936), edited by F. L. Mott and C. L. Jorgensen. The standard biography is by Carl Van Doren (1938). Useful critical studies include Bruce I. Granger’s Benjamin Franklin, an American Man of Letters (1964), Robert Middlekauff’s Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies (1996), and Alfred O. Aldridge’s Benjamin Franklin and Nature’s God (1967). See also David Levin’s “The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: The Puritan Experimenter in Life and Art,” Yale Review 53 (1964). A famous unfavorable response to Franklin can be found in D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature (1923). Franklin’s early years are discussed in A. B. Tourtellot’s Benjamin Franklin: The Boston Years (1977). Francis Jennings wrote Benjamin Franklin, Politician (1996), and Nian-Sheng Huang surveys two hundred years of American response to Franklin in Benjamin Franklin in America (1994).
Born in Boston and one of fifteen children, Benjamin Franklin was apprenticed to his brother, a printer, when he was twelve. Five years later, he abruptly left his brother's newspaper and went to Philadelphia, where he taught himself several languages and, by the time he was twenty-four, edited the Pennsylvania Gazette and published it in his own printing shop. Shortly thereafter he published Poor Richard's Almanac, a compilation of often ironic meditations on and maxims for achieving wealth, among other topics. When he retired in his early forties, he counted among his accomplishments the founding of a library, the invention of a stove, and the subscription to an academy that later became the University of Pennsylvania. Upon retirement Franklin began to study the natural sciences, publishing accounts of his experiments with electricity in London in 1751. Franklin spent the rest of his life as a diplomat, in London, Paris, and Philadelphia. He was asked to be a representative to the second Continental Congress, in 1775, helped draft the Declaration of Independence, and, as a member of the American delegation to the Paris peace conference in 1781, signed the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War. His Autobiography, composed between 1771 and 1790, reveals the complexities of the man -- his wit, his generosity, and his perceptiveness.
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Of the major historical figures from around the time of the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin, though burly and bald, is the enduring rock star. None of his peers accomplished so much in so many different endeavors: science and technology, printing and publishing; diplomacy, education, and public service; and an endless stream of writing – to educate his fellow citizens, promote personal growth and worldly success, and promulgate the political and social values he held most dear. He was also one of the great self-promoters in the American cultural tradition, one of the first true masters of the modern art of PR.
1. Generations of young people have been exhorted to model their own lives on Ben Franklin. Do you think that’s still possible, that the contemporary world still has room for that kind of achievement, or for an orderly and successful adventure in self-perfection? If you were putting together a list of latter-day Ben Franklins, whom would you include, and why?
2. Like nearly every human being, Franklin had a “downside,” as the modern biographies make clear. There were moral lapses, family troubles, and dubious and self-serving shortcuts in the professional and political life: Franklin was modern in more ways than one. In the construction and support of an important American icon, how much should that matter? In other words, how much attention should we pay, more than two centuries later, to the weaknesses of a person who accomplished so much? In constructing a biography for our own time, should those weaknesses be in the footnotes – or at the center of the account? What assumptions about personal identity and cultural needs underlie your thinking?
