and immigration brought not only urban amenities but also urban problems. Franklin was perfectly suited to such an expanding place, for even as a boy in Boston, he remarks, he had shown “an early projecting Public Spirit” and had built a wharf from which his playmates could fish. Considering his love of books, it seems inevitable that the first of his scores of considerable public works in Philadelphia should have been the creation of a public library in 1731, which became the model for similar subscription libraries all over America. A tireless civic improver, he also contrived better methods of paving, cleaning, lighting, and heating the city. Perhaps no facet of the Autobiography is more prophetic and representative of American culture than his quest for the New and Improved. In this he incarnated the profoundly American belief that things can be changed.

The Autobiography and Franklin’s Character

Because the Autobiography has often been taken as representative of American ideals, criticisms of the book have often been framed as criticisms of the country as well. To some of Franklin’s detractors, his pursuit of material success, moral regeneration, and social progress reveals a national creed of capitalist avarice, sexual repression, and bourgeois comfort. Others have beheld in the Autobiography an America suffering from emotional shallowness. For them, the life Franklin depicts is more than a success story. It is a story of nothing but success. Indeed, apart from some missteps aptly called “Errata,” the hero of the book does nothing compulsively, irrationally, or out of weakness, but appears to be governed by reason, moderation, and virtue. With his strong sense of identity he seems singularly immune to the workings of the conflict-torn inner self that Yeats called the “foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart,” his existence untroubled by stretches of ennui and waste. The absence of a sense of the harshness and inexplicability of life, together with his emphasis on material success, has gained Franklin scornful comments from such readers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and D. H. Lawrence, including Herman Melville’s notorious squelch that as “the type and genius of his land” Franklin was “everything but a poet”—i.e., that, like America, he lacked a soul.

Yet the very representative force of the Autobiography has obscured how it also subtly reveals a highly complex and unusual human being. In fact several “Franklins” play through the book: the hero, the implicit legend, the narrator, and the writer. These distinctions matter, because much praise and condemnation of Franklin confuses the earnest young protagonist, the godlike creator of legend, or the avuncular narrator with the less easy to characterize author. Unlike his abstemious hero, the real Franklin sometimes “drank more than a Philosopher ought,” as he put it, and in later life grew heavy and suffered from gout as a result of his love of rich food and wine; indeed his writings teem with food imagery. The straightforward narrator notwithstanding, the sly author wrote his first published essay in the guise of a middle-aged widow and ran away soon after to Philadelphia posing as one “that had got a naughty Girl with Child.” Later adopting some forty different pseudonyms, he remains one of the most elusive figures in American history.

Such features of Franklin’s character are evident in his other writings, and can still be glimpsed in the Autobiography, however much he strove to withhold them. His correspondence, for instance, contains many recollections of disillusionment. To choose one of many examples: in writing to a friend he recalled having been aboard a sloop on the Delaware River on a hot, windless day, the ship becalmed, the company not agreeable. Seeing near the riverside what seemed a green meadow with a large shade tree where he might sit and pass the time pleasantly until the tide turned, he prevailed upon the captain to put him ashore. But his desire brought him only disenchantment and ridicule:

Such disillusioning experiences, many times recorded in his letters, left the real Franklin with a deep distrust that seems to belie the essential optimism of the Autobiography. To avoid being disappointed in