I'm deeply in love with our times, a relentless booster for the progress of technology and the wonders of the modern world. Sometimes I like to play a game with myself called "What If Ben Franklin Were Alive Today?" in which I see if I am geek enough to explain things to Ben Franklin (were he shot forward in time) so that he would understand. Steel-frame skyscrapers, lasers, baseball, the miniskirt, internal combustion, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, the Internet, cellular biology, the periodic table, hip-hop music, it's all fair game. Needless to say I have a lot of spare brain-time on my hands.

Why Benjamin Franklin? Because of who he was. Other figures from history shared his relentless curiosity and erudition: Erasmus, Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton come to mind. But these men, save Newton, belong to another age, and Newton was a recluse. But Benjamin Franklin is engaging in so many ways-- he was a rabble-rouser, Renaissance man, writer, editor, diplomat, inventor, scientist, endless self-promoter, the last true Enlightenment thinker and the first true American. Moreover, his work on electricity was the foundation of a mind-boggling array of advances. He wrote the first Pennsylvania constitution! Discovered the gulf stream! Invented lightning rods! And most of all, he was deeply in love with his times.

The difficult thing about Franklin is something I've already mentioned: his gift for managing his personal mythology. As his autobiography proves, he was keenly aware of his reputation and happily manipulated it for his own ends. Consequently it is hard to identify the line between who Franklin was and who he said he was. Is he the simple, self-deprecating moral teacher of Poor Richard's Almanac? Is he the keen-witted inventor who flew a kite, invented bifocals, and wrote endlessly about the sciences? Is he a fraud, content to chase French courtesan tail while other people did the work and then collect the credit? Or is he the enterprising lad and genially amused gray eminence of his own autobiography? Of course, he is all these things. Franklin's nature is too changeable, and his legacy to large, to be captured in one description. All of this makes Edmund Morgan's recent biography of the man very welcome.

Edmund Morgan is one of the great historians of the past century, and he is certainly one of my favorites. Less prone to political self-refutation than younger lions like Eric Foner or Gordon Wood, and less prone to progressive determinism than others of his generation, Morgan's major works are landmarks of contemporary historical thought. Now at the end of a long career Morgan has written a project entirely for himself; a portrait of Ben Franklin drawn entirely from the man's own writings. Although it is billed as a biography, a more apt description of the result would be "appreciation."