HKB
Franklin, Benjamin. The Sayings of Poor Richard, 1733-1758. Condensed and ed. by T. H. Russell. N.p.: n.d. (Best aphorisms chronologically arranged.)
Goodman, N. G., ed. The Ingenious Dr. Franklin; Selected Scientific Letters of Benjamin Franklin. Philadelphia: 1931. (Includes several items not published in Smyth edition.)
Letters to Benjamin Franklin, from his Family and Friends, 1751-1790. [Ed. by William Duane.] New York: 1859.
Pepper, William. The Medical Side of Benjamin Franklin. Philadelphia: 1911. (Essentially quotations from the A. H. Smyth edition. Franklin is viewed as "an early and great hygienist.")
Stifler, J. M., ed. "My Dear Girl." The Correspondence of Benjamin Franklin with Polly Stevenson, Georgiana and Catherine Shipley. New York: 1927. (Engaging collection showing Franklin's "capacity for lively and enduring friendship" [p. vii]. Many of the letters to Franklin "printed now for the first time." Contains several of Franklin's letters hitherto unpublished.)
III. BIOGRAPHIES
Becker, Carl. "Benjamin Franklin," in Dictionary of American Biography. New York: 1931. VI, 585-98. (The most authoritative brief biography.)
*Bruce, W. C. Benjamin Franklin, Self-Revealed. 2 vols. New York: 1917. (In spite of occasional extravagant statements and a conservative temperament preventing him from discussing Franklin's religion with sympathetic and historical insight, Mr. Bruce has provided a brilliant and perspicuous survey. "Self-revealed" fails to do justice to Bruce's incisive commentary.)
*Faÿ, Bernard. Franklin, the Apostle of Modern Times. Boston: 1929. (A readable critical biography said to be based on "six hundred to nine hundred unpublished letters." Would have been more useful had it been given scholarly documentation. Some new light on Franklin's Masonic activities and his efforts during 1757-1762 to effect the growth of a British empire. [Faÿ used the Franklin-Galloway correspondence in the W. S. Mason and W. L. Clements collections.] Believes that Franklin was a "follower of the seventeenth-century English Pythagoreans": since this belief is largely undocumented, one feels it curious that Pythagoreanism should bulk larger than the pattern of thought provoked by Locke and Newton. See very critical reviews by H. M. Jones in American Literature, II, 306-12 [Nov., 1930], and W. C. Bruce, American Historical Review, XXXV, 634 ff. [April, 1930]. The latter concludes that "there is very little, indeed, in the text of the book under review that makes any unquestionably substantial addition to our pre-existing knowledge of Franklin, or is marked by anything that can be termed freshness of interpretation.")
Faÿ, Bernard. The Two Franklins: Fathers of American Democracy. Boston: 1933. (Charmingly spirited portrait of patriarchal Franklin of Passy [reworking of materials in Franklin, the Apostle of Modern Times]. Faÿ's habit of mingling quotation, paraphrase, and intuition in use of Bache's Diary suggests untrustworthy documentation. The second Franklin is, of course, Benjamin Franklin Bache [1769-1798, son of Sally Franklin and Richard Bache], editor of the republican Aurora General Advertiser. For a judicial, unsympathetic review see A. Guerard's in the New York Herald Tribune Books, Oct. 22, 1933. J. A. Krout, in the American Historical Review, XXXIX, 741-2 [July, 1934], observes that Faÿ "fails to establish the elder Franklin's paternal relation to the democratic forces of the 'revolutionary' decade after 1790.")
Fisher, S. G. The True Benjamin Franklin. Philadelphia: 1899. (Highly prejudiced interpretation with disproportionate attention to Franklin's acknowledged shortcomings.)
*Ford, P. L. The Many-Sided Franklin. New York: 1899. (A gracefully solid and inclusive standard work.)
Hale, E. E., and Hale, E. E., Jr. Franklin in France. From Original Documents, Most of Which Are Now Published for the First Time. 2 vols. Boston: 1887-1888. (Convenient collection of letters to Franklin; authors had access to Stevens and American Philosophical Society collections. Franklin letters and documents here given later published in Smyth. Useful chapters on Franklin's friends, his vogue in France, meetings with Voltaire, his activities in science, his interest in balloons, and investigation of Mesmerism. See reviews in Dial, VIII, 7, IX, 204; Nation, XLIV, 368; Athenaeum, II, 77 [1887]; Atlantic Monthly, LX, 318.)