Benjamin Franklin
by Carl Van Doren
Summary
Carl Van Doren, better known as a literary critic than a biographer, spent years assembling a single volume life of Benjamin Franklin built to restore the man behind the schoolbook image of a kite, a key, and a list of virtuous maxims. The book follows Franklin from his apprenticeship in his brother's Boston print shop through his rise as Philadelphia's leading printer and publisher of Poor Richard's Almanack, the annual pamphlet of proverbs and weather predictions that made Franklin's fortune and his public voice years before politics ever did, and into his parallel career as a self taught scientist whose work on electricity, the lightning rod grew directly out of it, earned him international scientific standing while he was still primarily known at home as a tradesman.
Van Doren gives real weight to Franklin's diplomatic years in France, where he served as American minister from 1779 to 1785 and proved instrumental in securing the French money and ships that let the Revolution survive, and to his old age at the Constitutional Convention, where Franklin was the only man alive to have signed the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War, and the Constitution itself. The book treats Franklin's wit as inseparable from his substance, a man who kept signing his letters plain B. Franklin, Printer long after he had become the most famous American in the world, and who used humor as a genuine tool of persuasion rather than as ornament.
Van Doren writes with a critic's ear for Franklin's own prose, quoting him at length and clearly relishing the voice, and the book moves briskly across an enormously varied life without losing its thread. It suits a reader who already knows the Franklin of grade school legend and wants the fuller, more contradictory man underneath, ambitious, calculating, genuinely curious about nearly everything, and funnier on the page than most founders ever managed to be.
Historical Context & Significance
Benjamin Franklin won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, arriving after Van Doren had already built a substantial reputation as a critic rather than a historian; his 1921 study The American Novel had helped revive serious interest in Herman Melville, and he had spent years as a magazine editor before turning his full attention to Franklin. Van Doren drew on the enormous surviving body of Franklin's own letters and writings, the same wit and self awareness that had made Franklin readable to his own contemporaries.
The biography became, for decades, the standard one volume life of Franklin that later scholars measured their own work against, admired for pulling the printer, scientist, and diplomat back into a single coherent figure rather than three separate careers loosely stitched together. Van Doren was elected to the American Philosophical Society, the learned society Franklin himself had founded in Philadelphia, in 1942, a fitting honor for a biographer whose book had done so much to explain why that society mattered to the man who started it.