Franklin Author:David Freeman Hawke hat manner of man was Benjamin Franklin? Contemporaries agreed he was a genius and the most beloved American of his time, but from that point they diverged in their opinions. " It is our own fault that we have not kept him," wrote David Hume as Franklin prepared to depart from Britain, adding that Franklin was " the first philosop... more »her and indeed the first man of letters for whom we are beholden to [America]." On the other hand, Franklin, said Lord Hillsborough, is the most " hypocritical old rascal that ever existed-a man who, if ever one goes to hell, he will." In this meticulously researched study of Franklin's life down to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, David Freeman Hawke has drawn on the best from the flood of recent scholarly work to present the man in all his complexity. This is not a debunking study. The genial, witty, generous Franklin is here. So, too, is the practical businessman who managed at the age of forty-two to retire from his print shop and live the rest of his largely off investments. Here is also the man who sought to improve " the taste of the town" (Philadelphia); the promoter of the still flourishing Library Company, Pennsylvania Hospital and the American Philosophical Society. Hawke seeks to present sides of Franklin seldom emphasized in previous works-the visionary, the politician, the electrical experimenter. But as a historian steeped in America's colonial past, Hawke never abstracts Franklin from his times. Nor, on the other hand, does he ever allow the man to become buried in the momentous events in which he participated. Throughout the book he constantly poses a single question: What manner of man was Franklin? In the end, he leaves it up to the reader to judge for himself. « less