Benjamin Franklin: The First Civilized American

by Phillips Russell

[A]t the age of 24, Benjamin becomes the head of his own business, without having saved any money, without having worked unusually hard, without having omitted any of the pleasures beloved by imaginative youth, and without having lived up to any of the maxims for which he is later to become renowned. -from "Chapter XI: Philadelphia's Youngest Master-Printer" It's with equal measures of unstinting respect and gentle reproach that renowned biographer Phillips Russell tackles the life of one of the legendary figures of colonial America and the Revolution, a figure he deems "mirthful, generous, open-minded, learned, tolerant, and humor-loving...the first American man of the world." A delight to read, this is a cheerful, warmly admiring recounting of the story of the printer and the politician, the debaucher and the diplomat, a man whose "chief weakness" was a lack of aptitude for mathematics, who was "not above looking to the church to do police duty over his womenfolk," who was "midwife at the birth of the world's first great republic." Profusely illustrated and bursting with the author's enthusiasm as well as its subject's abundant personality, this is a classic of American historical literature. American journalist CHARLES PHILLIPS RUSSELL (1883-1974) was a newspaper editor and professor of English and journalism at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He is the author of numerous books, including biographies of Thomas Jefferson, John Paul Jones, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William the Conqueror.

396 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Jason Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was good but also weird. I came to know Franklin first through typical American lore/bullshit, then through the Autobiography (also a lot of bullshit), then Mark Twain complaining about Franklin bullshit, and finally the historian David Waldstreicher lambasting Franklin's and fellow historians' hypocrisies regarding race and slavery. After all that, this old biography was a breath of fresh air, and the freshest was perhaps the epilogue. I did come to appreciate Franklin more thanks to Russell. Also, they simply wrote biographies differently back in Russell's day, and I'm always drawn to his era and it's newfound fascination with psychology. But in that vein, Russell went to odd lengths over the last 100 pages or so getting into Franklin's relations with French women. Honestly I was hoping to learn more about Franklin's role in the domestic and constitutional politics of the 1780s, which I think is a very underrated decade worthy of close sociobiological study. Oh well, I'm glad I read this anyway.