Volume 38, Number 3 · January 31, 1991

Secrets of Benjamin Franklin

By Edmund S. Morgan
Benjamin Franklin's Science
by Bernard Cohen

Harvard University Press, 273 pp., $35.00

Le Sceptre et la foudre: Franklin à Paris, 1776–1785
by Claude-Anne Lopez

Mercure de France, 335 pp., 130fr

Mon Cher Papa: Franklin and the Ladies of Paris
by Claude-Anne Lopez

Yale University Press, 404 pp., $14.95 (paper)

Becoming Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography and the Life
by Ormond Seavey

Pennsylvania State University Press, 266 pp., $24.95

The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Volumes 1–14
edited by Leonard W. Labaree

Yale University Press, each volume between 302 and 785 pp., $65.00

The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Volumes 15–26
edited by William B. Wilcox

Yale University Press, each volume between 302 and 785 pp., $65.00

The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 27
edited by Claude A. Lopez

Yale University Press, each volume between 302 and 785 pp., $65.00

The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 28
edited by Barbara B. Oberg

Yale University Press, each volume between 302 and 785 pp., $65.00

Benjamin Franklin: His Life As He Wrote It
edited by Esmond Wright

Harvard University Press, 297 pp., $25.00

Writings
by Benjamin Franklin, edited by J.A. Leo Lemay

The Library of America, 1,605 pp., $30.00

When Benjamin Franklin died on April 17, a little more than two hundred years ago, the first Congress of the United States under its new Constitution was busy addressing the problems of a young republic in a world of monarchies. Franklin was eighty-four years old, had been ill for some time, and his death could scarcely have come as a surprise, Still, apart from the republic's new president, Franklin was the best known of the Founding Fathers. His death could not go without some sort of official notice. The House of Representatives, after listening to a brief tribute by James Madison, voted to wear badges of mourning for two months and then got on with business.



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