Critic’s choice: Ben Franklin

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In the latest issue of the New Yorker, Harvard professor Jill Lepore offers a deft appreciation of Benjamin Franklin that is, so far, the critical find of the year.

Franklin, Lepore argues, has consistently been misread--in the 19th century as ‘frugal, prudent, sober, homey, quaint, sexless, humorless [and] preachy,’ and in our time as pretty much the opposite. Neither view does justice to a man who, in the truest Whitmanesque sense, contained multitudes.

As to why this is, Lepore lays responsibility at the feet of ‘Poor Richard’s Almanack,’ which Franklin began publishing in 1732, and in which many of his most famous aphorisms (‘He that best understands the World, least likes it,’ ‘Early to Bed, and early to rise, makes a Man healthy, wealthy and wise’) originally appeared.

It’s not that Lepore has an issue with ‘Poor Richard’ on its own terms; among the highlights of her essay are the copious quotes from it she sprinkles throughout like bits of literary seasoning. But it’s her belief that the ‘Almanack’--and more specifically ‘The Way to Wealth,’ the 1757 essay that encapsulated 25 years of Poor Richard’s wit and wisdom--has reduced Franklin to a caricature in the public mind.

‘Benjamin Franklin abridged his genius, his character, his life,’ Lepore writes. ‘But he reads better unabridged; and ‘The Way to Wealth’ makes a poor epitaph.’

David L. Ulin