★ 2018-05-28
For his first four decades, Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) strived for success as a printer, publisher, and journalist.Franklin's fame as a statesman and scientist, based on his achievements in the last half of his life, far overshadows his early business career in London and Philadelphia. Bunker (An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America, 2014, etc.), a former reporter for the Financial Times and an award-winning historian, creates a vibrant, perspicacious, and well-researched portrait of a man hungry for knowledge and ambitious for financial success. Unhappy as an apprentice to a candle and soap maker in Boston, the adolescent Franklin became an assistant to his brother, a printer, which at least put him in proximity to words and ideas. A printer's boy by day, he became a "scholar" at night, devouring books he borrowed from a local bookstore. In addition to Milton, Pope, and Socrates, Franklin read with delight Joseph Addison's daily publication The Spectator, rewriting items to teach himself style. Soon, the "scandalous ideas about God and the cosmos" that Franklin gleaned from his readings "opened a rift between the boy and his family," never to be healed. When Franklin "put the Christian God to the test of dialectic," God failed. No wonder Franklin escaped from Boston to more open-minded Philadelphia, where he found work with a printer. Inexperienced and somewhat credulous, he sometimes "tipped headlong into adult situations he was too naive to comprehend." In the 1720s, he decided to launch himself in London, a teeming, squalid city aptly captured by William Hogarth. Leaving Philadelphia, Franklin broke off a relationship with Deborah Read. Married and abandoned by the time Franklin returned, she became his common-law wife, raising his illegitimate son (the child of a relationship that Franklin kept secret for the rest of his life) along with their own children. Bunker adroitly describes Franklin's involvement in the religious and political controversies of the day, including slavery, as well as in the scientific projects for which he became renowned.An engaging, illuminating biography of a captivating figure.
"The Franklin that emerges here . . . is more dynamic and real than his homespun alias Poor Richard ever could be."
—Sam Kean, Wall Street Journal
"Anyone interested in Franklin and early America should find this book fascinating. It offers important insight into the internal struggles Franklin wrestled with as a youth and the questions he strove to answer. Ultimately, though, it is as much about the emergence of the concept of ingenuity in the pre-revolutionary age and among Franklin’s intellectual and scientific mentors and friends as it is about Franklin’s own path to ingenuity."
—Linda Killian, The Washington Post
"To pass yourself off as a self-made man is to head off questions about your origins. Nick Bunker is wise enough not to take Franklin at his word and resourceful enough to have unearthed his family’s past. The result is a robust, graceful half-life, a portrait of the young Franklin that casts fresh light on his energy, his boundless curiosity, his passion for the new—and the self-made."
—Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cleopatra: A Life and The Witches: Salem, 1692
"Make room on the top shelf of all Franklin biographies. Bunker here provides a stunning reappraisal of America’s most self-created genius, loaded with Franklinesque wisdom on every page, carried forward on the wings of words that simply sing."
—Joseph Ellis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 and Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
"It is nearly impossible to say anything new about Benjamin Franklin, but Nick Bunker has done it brilliantly with this study of the young Franklin. An extraordinary achievement."
—Gordon S. Wood, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and Alva O. Way University Professor, Brown University
"No Founding Father worked harder than Benjamin Franklin to establish a reputation as that most American (and enigmatic) of types: the self-made man. But as Nick Bunker brilliantly demonstrates in this fascinating new biography of the scientist as a conflicted young man, Franklin’s past—in particular his family’s past in England—followed him every step of the way."
—Nathaniel Philbrick, author of In the Heart of the Sea and Valiant Ambition
"Shockingly original, thoroughly researched, and strikingly well written, Young Benjamin Franklin has something for everyone. It's the best book on Franklin in more than a decade. Nick Bunker has once again made the familiar strange and wondrous."
—David Waldstreicher, Distinguished Professor of History at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and author of Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution
"[A] vibrant, perspicacious, and well-researched portrait of a man hungry for knowledge and ambitious for financial success. . . . Bunker adroitly describes Franklin's involvement in the religious and political controversies of the day, including slavery, as well as in the scientific projects for which he became renowned. An engaging, illuminating biography of a captivating figure."
—Kirkus (Starred Review)
"Bunker re-creates a life of restless ambition as he recounts how Benjamin Franklin finds in Philadelphia the opportunity he has been seeking for deploying the printing expertise and rhetorical skills he acquired while coming-of-age in Boston. . . . [A] nuanced portrait of the young Franklin captures the fugitive genius of a quintessential American."
—Booklist (Starred Review)
"Nick Bunker again provides an unusual look at American history with this accessible and riveting account of the ancestry and early life of Ben Franklin. Bunker’s diligent research and reconstruction of events from myriad sources were necessitated by Franklin’s own misleading writings. . . .The result is a deep, nuanced examination of the formative influences on an iconic American figure."
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
