The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

Gordon Wood’s argument is that Franklin spent most of his adult life as a British imperial gentleman — a retired tradesman turned scientist and colonial agent who lived nearly two decades in London and hoped to the last for an accommodation within the empire — and became “American” late, abruptly, and partly against his own preferences. The homespun, self-made, thrift-preaching Franklin of national memory is a posthumous construction, assembled from the Autobiography and from what later generations of Americans needed him to have been.

Why it’s on the list: Li Lu’s final section is biography, and it opens with three consecutive Franklin entries — the Almanack, this book, and Isaacson’s life — which makes Franklin the section’s organising figure and this the entry that complicates the myth the other two supply.

Where I saw it: Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, entry 2 of section VI, cited as Penguin Books, 2005. Full transcription: Li Lu’s Recommended Book List.

Connections

• Li Lu’s Recommended Book List — the list this came from.
• Li Lu — the Himalaya Capital founder who assembled it.
• Benjamin Franklin — the subject.
• Poor Richard’s Almanack — entry 1 of the section, Franklin in his own maxims.
• Benjamin Franklin — An American Life — Isaacson’s biography, entry 3 of the same section.
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin — the self-portrait Wood argues did most of the myth-making.
• Founding Fathers — the category Franklin joined later than the others.