Benjamin Franklin

Was Benjamin Franklin only the practical Yankee of Poor Richard’s maxims—the “first high-priest” of efficiency—or did that familiar figure conceal a more searching mind?

In this 1936 selection, editors Frank Luther Mott and Chester E. Jorgenson invite readers to look beyond Franklin’s best-known sayings and autobiography. Across writings from colonial America and the wider Enlightenment, Franklin appears as printer, correspondent, educator, political thinker, and experimenter: one moment weighing liberty and necessity, the next proposing a school or investigating a witch trial. The pieces, arranged largely in chronological order, trace a mind at work across a life, and ask how its many interests fit together. What kind of Franklin emerges when the familiar wit is only the beginning?

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