advantage of warding off disappointment. However that may be, Franklin was among the first to understand the power of the press and of advertising, and his cunningly ingratiating style marks an early stage of the modern skills of public relations and the Soft Sell.

To read the Autobiography as only a statement of American national ideals is thus to miss how much Franklin’s development sprang from motives singular and personal. The book relates not merely how one American “emerg’d from the Poverty & Obscurity in which I was born” but also how Benjamin Franklin outdid others. It is a story not only of success but also of triumph. Certainly its tale of personal growth speaks for scores of other American lives, fictional and actual. But Franklin’s complex combination of detachment and desire, diffidence and ambition, ice and fire, place its author among a more select company of such American naïfs as Hawthorne, Dickinson, Twain, and Frost, persons of much greater depth of being than their commonly known behavior and works at first suggest. Readers of the Autobiography ought to keep in mind another, less well-known comment of Herman Melville, who saw in Franklin “deep worldly wisdom and polished Italian tact, gleaming under an air of arcadian unaffectedness.” Keep in mind, too, that Franklin wanted to open a swimming school. For him, ordinariness and typicality were but changes of garment. This modest, charming man had a mind like a razor, and he baffles us still.