Franklin ReviewWMQ January 2000
Short summary:
Recovering Benjamin Franklin: An Exploration of a Life of Science and Service. ... A. J. Leo Lemay is completing a new biography of Franklin ...
Long summary:
Franklin ReviewWMQ January 2000Page 1Volume LVII Number 1 William and Mary Quarterly Review of Books 2000 by Omohundro Institute of Early American History and CultureBenjamin Franklin and His Gods. By Kerry S. Walters. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1999. Pp.xiv 213. $44.95 cloth; $18.95 paper.)Recovering Benjamin Franklin: An Exploration of a Life of Science and Service. By James Campbell.(Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company 1999. P. x 302. $69.95 cloth; $25.95 paper.)During the past ten years prompted in part by the 1990 bicentennial of Benjamin Franklinsdeath a number of critics and historians have taken a fresh look at Franklins career. Some of theirinterest springs from a growing appreciation for the institutional impact of print on the development of avigorous intellectual public sphere in the early eighteenth century. Michael Warners discussion ofFranklin in The Letters of the Republic (Cambridge Mass. 1990) comes immediately to mind. Recentbooks by Francis Jennings (Benjamin Franklin Politician New York 1996]) and by Robert Middlekauff(Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies Berkeley 1996]) reflect retrospective assessments of Franklin bysenior scholars who are distilling the results of a lifetime of work in the history of British North America.A. J. Leo Lemay is completing a new biography of Franklin and the volumes of the Yale edition ofFranklins papers are drawing closer to the end of their subjects vast and fascinating output. The twobooks under review here continue the process of reading Franklins life that has occupied at least a fewminds in virtually every decade this century since the appearance of D. H. Lawrences Studies in ClassicAmerican Literature (1923).Kerry Walterss Benjamin Franklin and His Gods takes Lawrence and Alfred Owen Aldridge asstarting points in offering a reassessment of Franklins religious views that "resists a facilely disjunctivereading of him as either atheist or conventional Christian" (p ...
Source: oieahc.wm.edu
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