Word: franklin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Spanning the period 1706-34, Volume I only takes Franklin to the age of 28, but these were the spawning years of his genius. He served his apprenticeship as a printer, journeyed to England and back, published the New England Courant, married, formed the "Junto," an intellectual self-improvement club of like-minded Philadelphians, and brought out the first three of the famed Poor Richard's Almanacks. Franklin also set down his basic religious outlook, a kind of deism that made him a logical child of the rationalist Enlightenment. Instinctively a yea-sayer to life, Franklin came very close...
Truth & Truisms. The chief pleasure of Ben Franklin during these years was journalism, and it is Franklin the journalist who dominates this book. There are the Addisonian "Silence Dogood" letters with their gently satiric barbs at Harvard College, bits of local gossip, humorous anecdotes, and a masterful and intricate essay on the value of a paper currency. In the profoundest sense, Franklin began a lifelong dialogue with his fellow Americans on their democratic destiny ("In those wretched Countries where a Man cannot call his Tongue his own, he can scarce call any Thing else his own"). But entertainment always...
...till Poor Richard that Franklin hit his stride as a maker and collector of aphorisms; e.g., "After 3 days men grow weary, of a wench, a guest, and weather rainy." "Men and Melons are hard to know," "There is no little enemy." Poor Richard, of course, is also chockablock with moralistic homilies. D. H. Lawrence once carped that Franklin "made himself a list of virtues, which he trotted inside like a gray nag in a paddock." Lawrence was not the first or the last to be infuriated by Franklin's middle-class prudence; yet Franklin's maxims-many...
Virtue & Fate. Ben Franklin was not as smug as he sometimes sounds. He was endlessly bent on civic and personal improvement, whether it was founding a library or starting a fire department. The doctrine of human perfectibility to which he subscribed was not yet the easy evolutionary faith of the 19th century but an everlasting challenge to be met with hard work, sound reason and unswerving virtue. In the end, he accepted fate with the engaging humility of his self-written epitaph...
...Franklin...