Benjamin Franklin (Yale Nota Bene S) 2nd Edition by Edmund S. Morgan (PDF)

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A New York Times BestsellerA 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award finalistA Washington Post Book World, Publisher’s Weekly, and Los Angeles Times Book Review Best Book of the Year“Superb. . . . The best short biography of Franklin ever written.”—Gordon Wood, New York Review of Books “None rivals Morgan’s study for its grasp of Franklin’s character.”—Joseph J. Ellis, London Review of BooksBenjamin Franklin is perhaps the most remarkable figure in American history: the greatest statesman of his age, he played a pivotal role in the formation of the American republic. He was also a pioneering scientist, a bestselling author, the country’s first postmaster general, a printer, a bon vivant, a diplomat, a ladies’ man, and a moralist—and the most prominent celebrity of the eighteenth century.Franklin was, however, a man of vast contradictions, as Edmund Morgan demonstrates in this brilliant biography. A reluctant revolutionary, Franklin had desperately wished to preserve the British Empire, and he mourned the break even as he led the fight for American independence. Despite his passion for science, Franklin viewed his groundbreaking experiments as secondary to his civic duties. And although he helped to draft both the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution, he had personally hoped that the new American government would take a different shape. Unraveling the enigma of Franklin’s character, Morgan shows that he was the rare individual who consistently placed the public interest before his own desires.Written by one of our greatest historians and a Pulitzer Prize winner, Benjamin Franklin offers a provocative portrait of America’s most extraordinary patriot.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐A good addition to our personnel library. It’s hard to believe just how hard of a life they led.Question: How do you think Ben would have coped with today’s political situation? Would he have made such a big footprint in history or society?

⭐Franklin’s portrait on the cover is an apt summary of the book’s contents: the man is rendered as a tight-lipped, observant, yet not very engaging personage with a certain flatness, even dullness about him.While Morgan illuminates the traits of Franklin the statesman very ably, concisely and detachedly, Franklin the man he treats cursorily, even hurriedly, leaving many parts of it in blurry shade. As Kant said, all men are made of crooked timber. Yet some stand tall and arresting despite, or even because of their crookedness. Morgan shows himself unwilling or unable to penetrate Franklin’s foibles, and thus his soul – and the reader is left to struggle for longer sections with the dryness of the political narrative. Edmund S. Morgan is a historian, not a biographer. Also, the book is not the result of original research. It is a rendition, for a more general public, of Morgan’s outstanding scholarship of the period. In the end, it tells.Morgan’s one-sided and glib rendering of Franklin’s relationship to other statesmen like Hay or Adams proves the point. He takes Franklin’s judgements of the others at face value. He should know better. If Adams was `vain’, Franklin was `lazy’. Suspicions, follies, hates, mutual accusations of untrustworthiness, or downright craziness are part and parcel of life, be it inside the family or lofty negotiations. In battle our best passions and our worst instincts and vanities are inextricably intertwined, and to miss the contradictions is to miss life’s tragedies and comedies – the stuff of a great and ironic yarn.Morgan finally makes much of the fact that Franklin’s own opinions might have differed from those he espoused in public. He is suppressing the time dimension in a chaotic and hence contingent evolutionary process. At the outset Franklin certainly had preferences – his own views. Even with hindsight he may have held the same preferences. But for better or worse, decisions were taken, and options were foreclosed. As a pragmatic man Franklin would have wasted no time or emotions regretting `the road not taken’. Like Galileo or Popper Franklin knew that in life the only truths are what we disprove, the rest remain conjectures or possibilities. This had made Franklin a great scientist. What made Franklin a great statesman was that he was prepared to apply this lesson to politics.

⭐I have to confess to being almost totally ignorant about Benjamin Franklin, the subject of this lovely book by Edmund Morgan. My knowledge of Franklin stopped with the basics–trained as a printer in colonial Boston, made his way to Philadelphia while still very young, published Poor Richard’s Almanac, proved that lighting was electrical, represented the American colonies in England and newly independent America in France.In slightly more than 300 elegantly written pages, Yale historian Morgan transformed this skeleton into a living, breathing man. Although Morgan based this brief history on a wealth of source documents, he tells Franklin’s story effortlessly. I felt as though I had taken a long walk with a very interesting companion, and come away with a whole new understanding of a great and complex figure.Morgan devotes most of the book to detailing Franklin’s central role in the long series of calculations and miscalculations that pushed thirteen loyal and tractable British colonies into revolution and forged them into the United States of America. Franklin, we learn, was there at every step, usually behind the scenes, but always extremely influential, a potent catalyst to change.It’s as fascinating to follow the evolution of Franklin’s own thoughts and feelings about the British Empire and the future of America as it is to get to catch a replay of the fateful steps in Britain and the colonies that led to the American revolution. I wish that America were blessed with more statesmen like Franklin; we could certainly use someone like him right now.Just one caveat–Franklin’s scientific accomplishments are mentioned, but really as a side issue. In this, Morgan seems to be following Franklin’s own lead; we learn that he viewed the scientific accomplishments that won him universal acclaim as less important than his far-sighted, patient, sometimes personally costly contributions as a politician and statesman.It’s hard to imagine a more readable, edifying or enjoyable introduction to Benjamin Franklin.Robert AdlerAuthor of Science Firsts: From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation (Wiley, 2002).

⭐I had neen looking for a good biography of Benjamin Franklin and this is the one I wanted.

⭐Benjamin Franklin’s life is one of the most fascinating in American life–he was a diplomat, legislator, printer and scientist. In this admittedly short biography in an admittedly crowded field (there have been a handful of similar books published in recent years), Edmund Morgan attempts to give us an impression of the character of the man.He starts with his athleticism, moves on to his views of religion and morals, and so on. Those who are unfamiliar with the factual details of Franklins life will be confused by the sudden appearance of details: Referring to his wife, Morgan writes: “He spent the last ten years of her life away from her in London.” This comes as a shock as we haven’t yet been told he spent so much time in the mother country.Morgan readily admits that the work is based largely on a recent compilation of Franklin documents on disk (“…and not much else”)and doesn’t offer original research.In sum, this becomes a difficult book to read and cannot be recommended except perhaps as an adjunct to Franklin-devotees who’ve already finished reading several more orthodox biographies.

⭐Morgan’s emphasis on the irreplaceable role Franklin played in gaining support for the Revolution in France and then negotiating the peace treaty with Britain was very compelling.

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