Benjamin franklin biography edmund morgan

Benjamin Franklin looms over American life like, perhaps, no other member of the Founders’ generation. Avuncular, approachable, Franklin seems like a Founder that one could befriend – and at the same time, he is a Founder whose breadth of achievements seems impossible to emulate.

And the reader seeking a thoughtful and well-written short biography of Franklin would do well to take up Edmund Morgan’s book that is titled simply Benjamin Franklin.

Historian Edmund Morgan, of Yale University, is one of the pre-eminent scholars of colonial, Revolutionary, and early-national American history.

His work emphasizes what is complicated about U.S. history, as with his Parkman Award-winning book American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, with its troubling suggestion that the fierce eloquence and courage with which Virginians like Washington and Jefferson and Madison and Monroe defended freedom may have had part of its basis in thes