Benjamin Franklin: Representative selections, with introduction, bibliograpy, and notes

About this book

This volume is a scholarly anthology that gathers the most extensive selection of Benjamin Franklin’s writings beyond his famous autobiography and the familiar sayings of Poor Richard. The editors open with a vigorous argument that America’s popular image of Franklin, as a pragmatic “David Harum” or the prototype of efficiency, has eclipsed his broader intellectual life as economist, political theorist, educator, journalist, scientist, and deist. After laying out that case, the book presents a chronologically arranged compendium of texts, from early pamphlets and the newly printed Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity to later letters, essays, and facsimiles such as Poor Richard Improved. The selections are drawn chiefly from the standard ten‑volume Writings of Benjamin Franklin and enriched by unpublished correspondence, with full bibliographic notes to support a “genetic” study of the evolution of his mind.

The prose reflects the formal, essayistic style of early‑modern scholarship, interweaving dense historical commentary with excerpts that retain Franklin’s original punctuation and italics. Readers who relish a deep dive into the intellectual currents of the Enlightenment, particularly those interested in the interplay of science, politics, and literature in the eighteenth‑century Atlantic world, will find this collection rewarding. It appeals to historians, literary scholars, and anyone seeking a fuller portrait of Franklin as a thinker as well as a public figure.

Opening lines

Benjamin Franklin's reputation in America has been singularly distorted by the neglect of his works other than his Autobiography and his most utilitarian aphorisms. If America has contented herself with appraising him as "the earliest incarnation of 'David Harum,'" as "the first high-priest of the religion of efficiency," as "the first Rotarian," it may be that this aspect of Franklin is all that an America plagued by growing pains, by peopling and mechanizing three thousand miles of frontier, has been able to see. That facet of Franklin's mind and mien which allowed Carlyle to describe him as "the Father of all Yankees" was appreciated by Sinclair Lewis's George F. …

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