Benjamin Franklin\u27s Female and Male Pseudonyms: Sex, Gender, Culture, and Name Suppression from Boston to Philadelphia and Beyond

Ever since Benjamin Franklin wrote his autobiography, biographers throughout the centuries have molded him into the model American. Recently, too, historians increasingly have chosen Benjamin Franklin as a biographical subject. In 2000, H. W. Brands wrote a seven-hundred-plus page biography of Franklin entitled The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, and, in 2002, Edmund S. Morgan published his more concise book, Benjamin Franklin. The current rising interest in Benjamin Franklin is not surprising in light of the surging surplus of biographical sketches of many of the Founding Fathers such as Joseph Ellis\u27s work on Thomas Jefferson and David McCullough\u27s biography of John Adams. In any case, as one can see by the title of Brands\u27s book, these modem Franklin biographers, like their predecessors, use Franklin to create an ideal citizen. Therefore, they tend to emphasize Franklin\u27s political and diplomatic roles, seeing his contributions to the public sphere and to the American Revolution as the most important aspects of his life