Benjamin Franklin and His Readers

Blame-all and Praise-all are two blockheads.

—Poor Richard, 1734

In 1938 Carl Van Doren prefaced his wonderful biography of Benjamin Franklin by noting that his was the first book in three-quarters of a century to attempt a single narrative covering the whole of Franklin's life, addressing the full range of his interests and activities across the span of the eighteenth century. Nearly 70 years after the appearance of Van Doren's book, it is difficult to conceive that anyone could ever have made such a claim or confronted such an exhilarating bibliographical vacuum. Since the bicentennial of the American Revolution, historians and biographers have repeatedly reassessed the major figures of the period, with Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin receiving the bulk of their attention. Since the end of the Second World War, however, Franklin is the first of these four to experience a centennial birthday—as, of course, he was the firstborn among them: 26 years older than George Washington (1732), 29 years older than John Adams (1735), and 37 years older than Thomas Jefferson (1743).

Perhaps as these tercentennial anniversaries approach, bookshelves will begin to overflow with new lives and studies of these key men, too, if bookshelves and books as we know them still exist that deep into the digital age. For now, in celebration of his three-hundredth birthday, or in response to the marketing opportunity created by that occasion, Benjamin Franklin's face is as ubiquitous a presence in Borders or Barnes and Noble as it is in the financial pages of most daily newspapers, where investment firms routinely trade on the reassuring influence of his imperturbable gaze.

The recent appearance of the first two volumes of Leo Lemay's copious work The Life of Benjamin Franklin (2006) brings to eight the number of comprehensive Franklin biographies to appear in the last six years. Some of these are Plutarchan rather than Boswellian in scope, though Lemay shames even Boswell with his voracious appetite for every detail that he can add to the biographical record. Edmund Morgan (2002) and Gordon Wood (2004) try to distill the results of their reflections on Franklin's life into concentrated form, rather than brew up entire bushels of research into mighty vats of exposition. Morgan, in particular, claims to have been inspired by the iridescent gleam of "one small disk," a CD-ROM containing several dozen volumes of the Yale edition of Franklin's papers, in order to write what Morgan calls "a letter of introduction to a man worth knowing," a concise result springing from a compact medium. But Morgan's modest book, too, is a complete biographical account, decorated with a Duplessis portrait of the 72-year-old diplomat painted during his first years in France, an oil study known as "Gray Coat No. 1," the image that seems to have been Franklin's personal favorite among all the renderings of his face and his rustic appearance that circulated throughout Europe during his term as minister to the French court.

Along with complete biographies, several partial or thematically based life studies have also appeared in close conjunction with Franklin...