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Summary
Summary
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
Author Notes
Walter Isaacson was born on May 20, 1952 in New Orleans, Louisiana. He received a B. A. in history and literature from Harvard College. He then attended the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar at Pembroke College and read philosophy, politics, and economics.
He began his career in journalism at The Sunday Times of London and then the New Orleans Times-Picayune/States-Item. He joined TIME in 1978 and served as a political correspondent, national editor and editor of new media before becoming the magazine's editor in 1996. He became Chairman and CEO of CNN in 2001, and then president and CEO of the Aspen Institute in 2003.
He has written numerous books including American Sketches, Einstein: His Life and Universe, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, Kissinger: A Biography, Steve Jobs, and The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. He is the co-author, with Evan Thomas, of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Following closely on the heels of Edmund Morgan's justly acclaimed Benjamin Franklin, Isaacson's longer biography easily holds its own. How do the two books differ? Isaacson's is more detailed; it lingers over such matters as the nature of Franklin's complex family circumstances and his relations with others, and it pays closer attention to each of his extraordinary achievements. Morgan's is more subtle and reflective. Each in its different way is superb. Isaacson (now president of the Aspen Institute, he is the former chairman of CNN and a Henry Kissinger biographer) has a keen eye for the genius of a man whose fingerprints lie everywhere in our history. The oldest, most distinctive and multifaceted of the founders, Franklin remains as mysterious as Jefferson. After examining the large body of existing Franklin scholarship as skillfully and critically as any scholar, Isaacson admits that his subject always "winks at us" to keep us at bay-which of course is one reason why he's so fascinating. Unlike, say, David McCullough's John Adams, which seeks to restore Adams to public affection, this book has no overriding agenda except to present the story of Franklin's life. Unfortunately, for all its length, it's a book of connected short segments without artful, easy transitions So whether this fresh and lively work will replace Carl Van Doren's beloved 1938 Benjamin Franklin in readers' esteem remains to be seen. Agent, Amanda Urban. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and even Adams stare down at you from Mt. Olympus. But Benjamin Franklin has always seemed the most accessible of our Founding Fathers. He looks out benignly from our $100 bill. He dispenses grandfatherly wisdom spiced with humor from Poor 0 Richard's Almanac. Of course, Franklin was a complicated and interesting personality, as this book illustrates. Isaacson, formerly the CEO of CNN and managing editor of Time 0 magazine, is currently president of the Aspen Institute. He has written a chronological biography that pays due tribute to Franklin's genius while revealing his harder edges. Franklin was clearly driven and supremely ambitious. In serving his ambition, he could be manipulative and a shameless self-promoter. His personal and political loyalties often shifted, yet he never forgave the "betrayal" when his illegitimate son remained loyal to Britain. --Jay Freeman Copyright 2003 Booklist
Choice Review
New biographies of Franklin are appearing as often as diet books, although the public has less obvious need of the former. This rendition is a birth-to-death work that treats the many sides of Franklin--printer, scientist, politician, diplomat, and family man--a formidable job. The author believes Franklin is the sort of person one would enjoy a beer with after work, and that is the Franklin one finds in this biography. Isaacson commends Franklin for his modeling of middle-class, bourgeois, public-spirited American character. The virtues shown here are the same ones found in Franklin's own autobiography: reasonableness, moderation, equanimity, practicality, and self-confidence. Isaacson does not doubt the success and the desirability of these virtues in the US. He has moderately researched the topic, reading Franklin's own writings and his other biographers, and writes engagingly; the book is a good choice for anyone who will enjoy only one biography of Franklin. But the biography uncovers almost nothing new about Franklin and broaches no new opinions about him. Isaacson read few collateral materials, mostly in manuscript, about Franklin or his times. This lack of in-depth work renders the author's sweeping judgments glib and of little interest to scholars. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Public libraries, general collections, undergraduates. J. D. Marietta University of Arizona
Guardian Review
If Winston Churchill, by popular acclaim, was the greatest Englishman, Ben Franklin was the greatest American. He was certainly the most lovable of the Founding Fathers, being bald and cuddly. He invented many useful things, including the lightning rod, the Franklin stove and bifocals. He also improved on the designs for urinary catheters and storage batteries. His important research into the nature of electricity earned him worldwide praise, as when Immanuel Kant called him "the new Prometheus" because of his experiments with kites and lightning. (For this work, he was awarded the prestigious Copley Medal by the Royal Society - the first person living outside Britain to be honoured in this way.) His contributions to American civic culture included the establishment of the first lending library and the first fire department. He was also a skilled diplomat, forging an alliance between America and France in 1777, assisting with the Anglo-American peace treaty of 1783, and helping to write the US constitution in 1787. His autobiography remains a classic American text. One could generate a dozen completely different lists of Franklin's accomplishments. The man was a professional accomplisher, making money hand over fist in several business ventures, including publishing and real estate, presiding over the birth of a nation, inventing and researching, organising the US postal service, politicking endlessly, crisscrossing the Atlantic as a diplomat extraordinaire, having dalliances with women young and old, charming kings and queens, exhausting his relatives and friends. It would take a village of biographers to chronicle his life effectively. This latest attempt in three years to capture Franklin, by Walter Isaacson, a former managing editor at Time and biographer of Henry Kissinger, has been hugely successful with American readers. It's a lively, readable and affecting book. Isaacson admires his subject deeply, and makes us admire him, too. I actually preferred the very recent biogra phies by HW Brands (2000) and Edmund S Morgan (2002), which are more critical and scholarly; but Isaacson provides a swift, entertaining narrative with just enough background material (about, for example, the American revolutionary war) to make the story accessible to a wide audience. What I especially like about Isaacson is his awareness that Franklin's reputation has shifted over the centuries. Franklin, he observes, "has been vilified in romantic periods and lionised in entrepreneurial ones. Each era appraises him anew, and in doing so reveals some assessments of itself." Indeed, Franklin was a quintessential Enlightenment figure, who went down very well among the French of the 18th century, where his wit, his lack of dogmatism, his attachment to reason and his practical approach to life were immensely admired. He was sensibly regarded as a prototypical American, which was a new thing in this world in the late 18th century. Isaacson detects at least two major strains in American life: the mystical vision that runs from the Puritans through Jonathan Edwards and, ultimately, to seers like Emerson and Thoreau, and "the side of pragmatism" and "practical benevolence" that derives, in part, from Franklin. Franklin was, as David Brooks once noted, "our founding yuppie". He rose to eminence from fairly modest beginnings in Boston, the 10th son of the pious Josiah and Abiah Franklin, who indentured their precocious boy to an older brother, James, where he would learn the craft of printing. Young Ben pretended that he had got a girl pregnant, escaping his brother's clutches on a ship to New York, from where he proceeded to Philadelphia in 1723 with only a single Dutch dollar in his pocket. He was 17 years old, in possession of nothing but a decent knowledge of the printing business. It was rags to riches from that point on: Horatio Alger on speed. Ben networked like a fiend, quickly befriending the governor of the state, who employed him in various capacities. He set up a print shop, and soon owned a newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette - the most widely read paper in the colonies. He wrote and self-published almanacs and books. He became, indeed, a mogul of sorts, as Isaacson notes: "Franklin's print shop had by then grown into a successful, vertically integrated media conglomerate. He had a printing press, publishing house, newspaper, an almanac series and partial control of the postal system. The successful books he had printed ranged from Bibles and psalters to Samuel Richardson's novel Pamela . . . He also had built a network of profitable partnerships and franchises from Newport and New York to Charleston and Antigua. Money flowed in, much of which he invested, quite wisely, in Philadelphia property." Franklin was, it seems, the Rupert Murdoch of his age. Then at 42, only halfway through his life, he retired from printing to become a world-famous scientist, inventor, public servant, administrator, diplomat, writer, wit and bon vivant. He also became a flirt, attracting a wide range of women, foreign and domestic. Isaacson struggles in his book to make sense of Franklin's common- law marriage to Deborah Read. She had known Ben since he straggled into Philadelphia. In his autobiography, written to an illegitimate son fathered during the period when he was still looking for a wife, he confessed that the "hard-to-be-governed passion of youth had hurried me frequently into intrigues with low women that fell in my way, which were attended with some expense and great inconvenience". He settled in with Deborah in 1730, unable to marry her because she had been previously married to an unreliable potter who absconded to the West Indies. Bigamy being a crime, Franklin protected himself by simply living with Deborah. "Franklin is often described as (or accused of) being far more practical than romantic, a man of the head rather than heart," writes Isaacson. "The tale of his common- law marriage to Deborah provides some support for this view." Franklin certainly adored his women. He "enjoyed their company and conversation", says his biographer, "and was able to take them seriously as well as flirt with them". In a wry essay of 1745, "Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress", Franklin argues for the virtues of sleeping with older women. He lists many reasons for this preference, among them: they won't get pregnant, they are good conversationalists, the are grateful for the sex, and they tend to grow old "from the head down". On this latter point, he notes that even after their faces wrinkle, their bodies hold up, "so that covering all above with a basket, and regarding only what is below the girdle, it is impossible of two women to know an old one from a young one". Tell this to Germaine Greer, Mr Franklin. In reality, Franklin preferred younger women, especially in his old age. He spent many years abroad without his wife, and was perceived in France as a successful womaniser. One of his closest friends was the young Madame Brillon de Jouy, whom he met in 1777. She was 33 at the time, married to a man much her senior. She and Franklin had a relationship (the exact level of intimacy is not known) that lasted for eight years, during which time they exchanged more than 130 letters. Many of these are frankly, amusingly sexual, and Isaacson quotes from them freely. The great triumph of Franklin's old age was, of course, his work at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. At 81, he played a central role in the drafting of that magnificent document, although he understood its flaws only too well. His withering last words to the convention suggest how fiercely independent, and prophetic he could be: "I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such: because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no Form of Government but what may be a Blessing to the people if well-administered; and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a Course of Years, and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other." Alas, these prophetic words of the great sage are not included in Isaacson's biography. They might have unsettled American readers, who cannot bear very much reality. Jay Parini, a poet and novelist, edited The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature . To order Benjamin Franklin for pounds 17 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-parini.1 This latest attempt in three years to capture Franklin, by [Walter Isaacson], a former managing editor at Time and biographer of Henry Kissinger, has been hugely successful with American readers. It's a lively, readable and affecting book. Isaacson admires his subject deeply, and makes us admire him, too. I actually preferred the very recent biogra phies by HW Brands (2000) and Edmund S Morgan (2002), which are more critical and scholarly; but Isaacson provides a swift, entertaining narrative with just enough background material (about, for example, the American revolutionary war) to make the story accessible to a wide audience. What I especially like about Isaacson is his awareness that Franklin's reputation has shifted over the centuries. Franklin, he observes, "has been vilified in romantic periods and lionised in entrepreneurial ones. Each era appraises him anew, and in doing so reveals some assessments of itself." Indeed, Franklin was a quintessential Enlightenment figure, who went down very well among the French of the 18th century, where his wit, his lack of dogmatism, his attachment to reason and his practical approach to life were immensely admired. He was sensibly regarded as a prototypical American, which was a new thing in this world in the late 18th century. Isaacson struggles in his book to make sense of Franklin's common- law marriage to Deborah Read. She had known [Ben Franklin] since he straggled into Philadelphia. In his autobiography, written to an illegitimate son fathered during the period when he was still looking for a wife, he confessed that the "hard-to-be-governed passion of youth had hurried me frequently into intrigues with low women that fell in my way, which were attended with some expense and great inconvenience". He settled in with Deborah in 1730, unable to marry her because she had been previously married to an unreliable potter who absconded to the West Indies. Bigamy being a crime, Franklin protected himself by simply living with Deborah. "Franklin is often described as (or accused of) being far more practical than romantic, a man of the head rather than heart," writes Isaacson. "The tale of his common- law marriage to Deborah provides some support for this view." - Jay Parini.
Kirkus Review
Nicely done life of "the most accomplished American of his age." Benjamin Franklin may have been among the leading revolutionary firebrands of his time, but, suggests Aspen Institute president Isaacson (Kissinger, 1992), he wouldn't be at all out of place in an office park or perhaps Rotary Club meeting today. That doesn't mean to say that Franklin was a proto-Republican, but instead a practical-minded businessman who found much virtue in striking compromises, building consensus, and networking--and who pinched pennies with the best of them, adopting vegetarianism only so that the money saved on meat could go into his savings and studies. Yet, all that said, Isaacson reminds us that Franklin essentially retired, wealthy and content, in his early 40s and devoted the rest of his days to doing acts of public good, pressing the cause of meritocracy in the service of "social mobility rather than an established elite" and furthering the cause of American independence at considerable risk to his property and person. Isaacson charts the trajectory of Franklin's political thought on all kinds of matters; he notes, for instance, that although Franklin enthusiastically accepted advertisements for slave sales in the newspapers he published and owned "one or two household slaves off and on for much of his life," he came to see the incompatibility of such commerce with the revolutionary ideals he espoused and ended his days as a committed abolitionist. Similarly, as the very exemplar of a self-made man, Franklin gave much thought to the inequalities wrought by inherited fortune, arguing "that the accumulation of excess wealth and the idle indulgence in frivolous luxuries should not be socially sanctioned." Alas, Franklin's arguments did not carry the day in most particulars, but he remains an ideal American type--and one well served by this sympathetic and admiring study. A little less sophisticated than H.W. Brands's The First American, but a solid contribution to Frankliniana all the same. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
A former Time magazine managing editor and former CNN chair/CEO, now serving as Aspen Institute president, Isaacson (Kissinger: A Biography) here presents what he calls "a chronological narrative biography" of Benjamin Franklin. The result is an admirable work that takes its place among recently acclaimed biographies by H.W. Brands and Edmund Morgan as one with special appeal to a general audience. Isaacson considers the social activist and historical actor, focusing on Franklin as "a civic-minded man" who expressed the virtues and values of a rising middle class, America's new ruling class of ordinary citizens. He also highlights Franklin's personal relations with numerous individuals-including his common-law wife, Deborah Read-his famous moments and achievements, e.g., the kite-flying electricity experiment, and his evolving social thought on a range of issues, including slavery. Isaacson serves the needs of nonspecialists with three helpful sections: a "Chronology" of Franklin's life, a "Cast of Characters" of the most important men and women Franklin knew, and "Currency Conversions." A fine addition to the Franklin literature, this book is recommended mainly for public libraries.-Charles L. Lumpkins, Pennsylvania State Univ., State College (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One: Benjamin Franklin and the Invention of America His arrival in Philadelphia is one of the most famous scenes in autobiographical literature: the bedraggled 17-year-old runaway, cheeky yet with a pretense of humility, straggling off the boat and buying three puffy rolls as he wanders up Market Street. But wait a minute. There's something more. Peel back a layer and we can see him as a 65-year-old wry observer, sitting in an English country house, writing this scene, pretending it's part of a letter to his son, an illegitimate son who has become a royal governor with aristocratic pretensions and needs to be reminded of his humble roots. A careful look at the manuscript peels back yet another layer. Inserted into the sentence about his pilgrim's progress up Market Street is a phrase, written in the margin, in which he notes that he passed by the house of his future wife, Deborah Read, and that "she, standing at the door, saw me and thought I made, as I certainly did, a most awkward ridiculous appearance." So here we have, in a brief paragraph, the multilayered character known so fondly to his author as Benjamin Franklin: as a young man, then seen through the eyes of his older self, and then through the memories later recounted by his wife. It's all topped off with the old man's deft little affirmation -- "as I certainly did" -- in which his self-deprecation barely cloaks the pride he felt regarding his remarkable rise in the world. Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us. George Washington's colleagues found it hard to imagine touching the austere general on the shoulder, and we would find it even more so today. Jefferson and Adams are just as intimidating. But Ben Franklin, that ambitious urban entrepreneur, seems made of flesh rather than of marble, addressable by nickname, and he turns to us from history's stage with eyes that twinkle from behind those newfangled spectacles. He speaks to us, through his letters and hoaxes and autobiography, not with orotund rhetoric but with a chattiness and clever irony that is very contemporary, sometimes unnervingly so. We see his reflection in our own time. He was, during his eighty-four-year-long life, America's best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer, and business strategist, and he was also one of its most practical, though not most profound, political thinkers. He proved by flying a kite that lightning was electricity, and he invented a rod to tame it. He devised bifocal glasses and clean-burning stoves, charts of the Gulf Stream and theories about the contagious nature of the common cold. He launched various civic improvement schemes, such as a lending library, college, volunteer fire corps, insurance association, and matching grant fund-raiser. He helped invent America's unique style of homespun humor and philosophical pragmatism. In foreign policy, he created an approach that wove together idealism with balance-of-power realism. And in politics, he proposed seminal plans for uniting the colonies and creating a federal model for a national government. But the most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself. America's first great publicist, he was, in his life and in his writings, consciously trying to create a new American archetype. In the process, he carefully crafted his own persona, portrayed it in public, and polished it for posterity. Partly, it was a matter of image. As a young printer in Philadelphia, he carted rolls of paper through the streets to give the appearance of being industrious. As an old diplomat in France, he wore a fur cap to portray the role of backwoods sage. In between, he created an image for himself as a simple yet striving tradesman, assiduously honing the virtues -- diligence, frugality, honesty -- of a good shopkeeper and beneficent member of his community. But the image he created was rooted in reality. Born and bred a member of the leather-aproned class, Franklin was, at least for most of his life, more comfortable with artisans and thinkers than with the established elite, and he was allergic to the pomp and perks of a hereditary aristocracy. Throughout his life he would refer to himself as "B. Franklin, printer." From these attitudes sprang what may be Franklin's most important vision: an American national identity based on the virtues and values of its middle class. Instinctively more comfortable with democracy than were some of his fellow founders, and devoid of the snobbery that later critics would feel toward his own shopkeeping values, he had faith in the wisdom of the common man and felt that a new nation would draw its strength from what he called "the middling people." Through his self-improvement tips for cultivating personal virtues and his civic-improvement schemes for furthering the common good, he helped to create, and to celebrate, a new ruling class of ordinary citizens. The complex interplay among various facets of Franklin's character -- his ingenuity and unreflective wisdom, his Protestant ethic divorced from dogma, the principles he held firm and those he was willing to compromise -- means that each new look at him reflects and refracts the nation's changing values. He has been vilified in romantic periods and lionized in entrepreneurial ones. Each era appraises him anew, and in doing so reveals some assessments of itself. Franklin has a particular resonance in twenty-first-century America. A successful publisher and consummate networker with an inventive curiosity, he would have felt right at home in the information revolution, and his unabashed striving to be part of an upwardly mobile meritocracy made him, in social critic David Brooks's phrase, "our founding Yuppie." We can easily imagine having a beer with him after work, showing him how to use the latest digital device, sharing the business plan for a new venture, and discussing the most recent political scandals or policy ideas. He would laugh at the latest joke about a priest and a rabbi, or about a farmer's daughter. We would admire both his earnestness and his self-aware irony. And we would relate to the way he tried to balance, sometimes uneasily, the pursuit of reputation, wealth, earthly virtues, and spiritual values. Some who see the reflection of Franklin in the world today fret about a shallowness of soul and a spiritual complacency that seem to permeate a culture of materialism. They say that he teaches us how to live a practical and pecuniary life, but not an exalted existence. Others see the same reflection and admire the basic middle-class values and democratic sentiments that now seem under assault from elitists, radicals, reactionaries, and other bashers of the bourgeoisie. They regard Franklin as an exemplar of the personal character and civic virtue that are too often missing in modern America. Much of the admiration is warranted, and so too are some of the qualms. But the lessons from Franklin's life are more complex than those usually drawn by either his fans or his foes. Both sides too often confuse him with the striving pilgrim he portrayed in his autobiography. They mistake his genial moral maxims for the fundamental faiths that motivated his actions. His morality was built on a sincere belief in leading a virtuous life, serving the country he loved, and hoping to achieve salvation through good works. That led him to make the link between private virtue and civic virtue, and to suspect, based on the meager evidence he could muster about God's will, that these earthly virtues were linked to heavenly ones as well. As he put it in the motto for the library he founded, "To pour forth benefits for the common good is divine." In comparison to contemporaries such as Jonathan Edwards, who believed that men were sinners in the hands of an angry God and that salvation could come through grace alone, this outlook might seem somewhat complacent. In some ways it was, but it was also genuine. Whatever view one takes, it is useful to engage anew with Franklin, for in doing so we are grappling with a fundamental issue: How does one live a life that is useful, virtuous, worthy, moral, and spiritually meaningful? For that matter, which of these attributes is most important? These are questions just as vital for a self-satisfied age as they were for a revolutionary one. Copyright © 2003 by Walter Isaacson Excerpted from Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
