Walter Isaacson insists Franklin’s prose is the standout among the man’s countless endeavors.

Although he is the most approachable of America’s founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin is also the most perilous to biographers. An inventive and prolific writer, Franklin continues to meet, greet and shake hands with American readers from beyond the grave, as if to ensure we all know him as the rotund, charming diplomat he was during his lifetime.

A biographer who sets out to parse fact from fiction then risks the ire of readers because we love this "Franklin." He is the self-made man who winks with pride but professes humility to be a cardinal virtue. He is a jester who can be deadly serious about government, and a plain-speaking statesman who invented practical things like bifocals and flippers in his spare time.

As a result of Franklin's tireless posthumous image promotion, we can love the man, but never truly know him. Walter Isaacson concedes to this fact in his immensely readable new biography, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, which examines and praises his skills for myth-making and subterfuge. It is not a revisionist biography, but a celebratory one that depicts Franklin as, among other things, America's first public relations genius.

A former managing editor of Time and chairman of CNN, Isaacson is the perfect writer to appreciate Franklin's knack for using media to further his own goals. Indeed, he addresses Franklin less as a hoary founding father and more like a 17th-century Rupert Murdoch.

The book's first third is a delicious account of Franklin using his charm to worm his way into Boston's and Philadelphia's crowded printing markets.

Like many moguls, Franklin got his start early, at age 12, apprenticing in his brother's printing shop in Boston. At this time, the town of 8,000 souls had just one newspaper, which was owned and delivered by its postman. "Then, as today," Isaacson writes, "there was an advantage in the media business to controlling both content and distribution."

But that would soon change as Franklin's brother entered the fray, giving Franklin a chance to begin his work as a journalist. Franklin later fled to Philadelphia, where he lived off his wits and began the printing business that became the cornerstone of his own empire.

While H.W. Brands' recent biography does a better job of making readers feel they're up close and personal with a living, breathing man, and Edmund Morgan's Benjamin Franklin gives more treatment to Franklin's years as a cosmopolitan statesman, Isaacson dedicates much of his time to making Franklin's byline come to life. Clearly, he believes it is through Franklin's prose that we best understand him.

Here things get tricky, for although Franklin continuously swore off direct confrontation, he found a way to put himself at the center of debate in Philadelphia by creating dozens more fictitious bylines. Writing as Busy Body, The Casuist, Alice Addeterongue, Poor Richard and others, Franklin dispensed sex advice, relayed gossip, weighed in on abortion, advocated city projects, started a library and got in plenty of digs at his competitors.

He also got rich in the process. While some biographers and critics have faulted Franklin for a fealty to coin above all else, Isaacson interprets Franklin's bourgeois concern for wealth a healthy American trait. Franklin, he notes, never pursued personal gain without combining it with some greater public good.

It doesn't matter that some of the man's opinions diverge, because in a way, their contradictory muchness is essential Franklin. Writing under pseudonyms, playing both sides of the fence, Franklin embodied the multiplicity of debate he would later help make a key ingredient to America's Constitution.

Other writers have struggled to keep Franklin under control, but Isaacson creates just the right tone of admiring distance. He does not try to match Franklin witticism for witticism, but he gives his readers a wink and a nod when appropriate, and knows how to quote liberally from Franklin without making it feel as if Franklin ghostwrote this book, too.

It's easy to think Franklin would approve of this version of his life. "Search others for their virtues," Franklin once instructed. Walter Isaacson has obviously taken that admonition to heart by crafting an entertaining addition to the long afterlife of Benjamin Franklin.