Benjamin Franklin's Money: A Financial Life of the First American

FAIN: FZ-287066-22

Edward Gordon Gray
Florida State University (Tallahassee, FL 32306-0001)

Research and writing of a book about Benjamin Franklin’s attitudes towards money and finance.

Research and writing of a book about money and finance in the life of Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin’s Money is the first financial life of the most famous colonial American. It follows Benjamin Franklin’s rise from indentured servant to eighteenth-century media mogul and it explains how Franklin managed to escape money’s darker connotations. Franklin’s rise, the book contends, was enabled not only by his careful management of his own and others’ money, but also by his careful management of his reputation as a maker of money. It is not coincidental, my book contends, that the early American most associated with money was also early America’s greatest humanitarian.