As a boy he traded anecdotes with Cotton Mather about Puritan theology as an elder statesman he compared notes with Thomas Jefferson on the likely course of the French Revolution. The long arc of Franklin's life (1706-90) presents a major challenge to all biographers. The erudition is somewhat conspicuous here, but it is also impressive. If anything, Isaacson engages in a bit of scholarly overkill at the end, providing a separate conclusion and epilogue on Franklin's legacy, a chronology of important dates, brief biographies of all the supporting characters in the story, conversion tables that provide modern dollar equivalents for British and colonial currency, an annotated bibliography and about 50 pages of endnotes. Murrow, diligently and often deftly interrogating the man while sifting through the veritable mountain of scholarship that has accumulated around him over the past two centuries. Instead of Franklin's Boswell, Isaacson comes across as his Edward R. Among the items that were new to me: that Franklin investigated ways to make flatulence less odorous, and that Davy Crockett went down at the Alamo carrying a copy of Franklin's ''Autobiography'' in his jacket. It is a thoroughly researched, crisply written, convincingly argued chronicle that is also studded with little nuggets of fresh information. But anyone assuming that ''Benjamin Franklin: An American Life'' is aimed at the coffee table would be dead wrong. Isaacson wrote this book while serving as managing editor at Time and then as head of CNN, both full-time jobs that presumably left little opportunity for travels back to the 18th century. Now Walter Isaacson joins the list with a full-length portrait virtually assured to bring Franklin's remarkable career before a sizable readership. Brands produced a well-received cradle-to-grave life of Franklin, then Edmund Morgan came forward with a beguilingly Boswellian character study of the great American sage.

John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson appeared to be the chief beneficiaries of this trend until recently, when Benjamin Franklin moved into contention. For reasons that no one has adequately explained, those prominent Americans often mythologized and capitalized as Founding Fathers, or alternatively demonized as the deadest-whitest-males in American history, have surged into vogue over the past decade.

Benjamin franklin an american life