ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book explores the Biography, and Writing of History of Benjamin Franklin. It can be hard to imagine Franklin as a poor boy in Boston, or as an unkempt and scrappy teenager coming off the boat in Philadelphia harbor, or as an up-and-coming printer cranking out hundreds of copies of the Pennsylvania Gazette in the heat of the Philadelphia summer. Perhaps the US Treasury is partly to blame. Since 1996, it has used Duplessis 1785 portrait of an almost eighty-year-old Franklin on the $100 bill, a change from the 1778 portrait it had used since 1929. Franklin sat for his first portrait in 1748, the year that he retired from being a printer and became a gentleman. But whether we recognize him or not, this portrait is still Franklin as much as are the later ones. It therefore behooves the biographer to understand Franklin in his entirety.
