| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius. By Joyce E. Chaplin. (New York: Basic, 2006. x, 421 pp. $27.50, ISBN 0-465-00955-7.)

"This is the Age of Experiments," the scientist Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1788, little knowing that the early twenty-first century would become an age of Franklin biographies (J. A. Leo Lemay and Paul M. Zall eds., The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: A Genetic Text, 1981, p. 164). The tercentennial of Franklin's birth has produced a fresh volley of scholarship on the quintessential early American, comprising both routine comprehensive biographies and examinations of specific segments of Franklin's life. The Harvard University history professor Joyce E. Chaplin straddles the line, filtering biographical staples of Franklin's life through his fascination with science. She asserts that although Franklin and Albert Einstein were the only scientists to attain iconic status in popular culture, "there has never been a biography that examines Franklin's scientific pursuits as an intrinsic part of his life's story," until hers (p. 5). She has succeeded admirably in contributing to the Franklin literature, producing a book accessible to diverse audiences while seldom straying from its theme.

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