WARNING: You have left the Ben Franklin-free zone. But I don't apologize, in this week of Franklin's 300th birthday, for offering yet another bit of Franklinania. This one isn't kitschy, and it doesn't wear wire-rim glasses. J.A. Leo Lemay, the H.F. du Pont professor of English at the University of Delaware, has been a colleague of mine for 15 years, roughly the time he has been working on his definitive, seven-volume biography, The Life of Benjamin Franklin. The first two installments were just published by the University of Pennsylvania Press; in roughly 1,200 pages, they take Franklin up to 1748, when he was a mere 42 years old. Lemay—who turned 71 on Jan. 17; he shares Franklin's birthday—is also the editor of the Library of America's edition of Franklin's writing, and has constructed a Web site, "Benjamin Franklin: A Documentary History" (www.english. udel.edu/lemay/franklin), that attempts to record all known facts about Franklin's actions and movements. I sat down with Lemay in his office on UD's Newark campus to talk about the man and the book.

City Paper: Amazon.com lists 3,007 books on the subject "Benjamin Franklin." Even given that there weren't that many when you embarked on the project, why did you feel there was a need for another biography?

J.A. Leo Lemay: The biographies are cursory. Franklin had a very long life with innumerable activities. He did various types of things extraordinarily well. The biographies devote a few pages to the electricity, but the historians of science have devoted books to his electricity. The biographies devote a page or two to his political doings in Pennsylvania in the 1750s, but there are whole books about that. The biographies, time and again, just barely touch the facts of his life. And also, until me, no one ever read all Franklin's financial accounts, almost all of which are at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. I try to do some justice to most of his multiple activities

CP: Aside from the wealth of fact and detail, what new stuff can we find in your book?

Lemay: There are new interpretations. For example, in Volume I of the biography, I argue that Franklin's brother James Franklin was trained in Boston and not in England, as all previous accounts have it. Regarding Franklin's courtship of Deborah Read, whom he was unofficially engaged to marry before he went to England in 1725, everyone says, "Oh, it was so terrible that he treated her so badly." He only wrote one letter when he was off in England, and he didn't return right away and marry her. But that's because in the Autobiography, Franklin gallantly describes himself as abandoning her. I show that in reality, he found himself stuck in England with no money for a return passage, and that Deborah could not have received a letter from him, explaining the situation, until at least four months after he left. She marries John Rogers nine months to the day after Franklin sails. Franklin is being a gentleman. Well, all of this is ignored by all previous scholars, who say, "Oh, it was so terrible that he abandoned Deborah."

CP: What else?

Lemay: Most biographers have ignored Franklin's early anti-British positions. In 1751, he writes the most savage editorial against England and England's practices, not only that had ever appeared, but that ever would appear until the 1760s, until after the Stamp Act. Franklin writers ignore this because they're Anglophiles, for the most part. Most of the students of Colonial American literature love England, and they love to go to London and spend time in the British Library, and go to plays and so forth. But Franklin is anti-English, anti-Royal; he makes fun of the idea of royalty, and of aristocracy, throughout his life. He writes in 1734 or so, "Every king must sit on his own arse." He has these just absolutely unrelenting attacks on kings and royalty.

CP: You also give a lot of attention to Franklin's achievements as a journalist and a writer. Is that something that has been given somewhat of a short shrift?

Lemay: Yes. Dr. Samuel Johnson, his contemporary, is extremely well-known, extremely widely studied, but at the time, Benjamin Franklin was much more popular than Dr. Samuel Johnson. His autobiography is the most popular autobiography in the world. Indeed, Franklin is the greatest writer of Colonial America. Plus, he's our first great humorist. Like when he says the leap of the whale over Niagara Falls is one of the grandest sights for all who have seen it. He's spoofing travelers' tall tales about America, and he says that "it's amazing, but as everyone knows, whales love to eat cod, and as the cod go up the river and go up the falls, the whales follow them, eat the cod, and they jump over Niagara Falls in pursuit of the cod." The tale seems almost reasonable to begin with, and then it becomes more incredible, and at last one guffaws at the absurdity of it.

CP: The term "Renaissance man" is a terrible cliche, but it seems that if anyone deserved it, it would be Franklin. Do you agree?

Lemay: I do. He was an extremely great genius, and extremely hardworking. Jefferson and Adams were geniuses, too, and I think George Washington was an extraordinarily able person. He may not have been quite so great a genius, but his personality was sounder by far than John Adams, and his risking himself time and again was absolutely admirable. So, those four people I think are just wonderful, but there is no doubt that Benjamin Franklin had much the greater achievements in many fields. For example, Thomas Jefferson liked science, but Franklin was this genius who made new things entirely. At the time, no one knew what electricity was, and some people thought it was created from nothing, and you created it by rubbing things and such. And Franklin was the first person to theorize that no, it's some kind of matter that we don't create and we don't get rid of. We change its location, we make it plus or minus. Franklin's theories turned out time and again to be true. So that he theorizes that there is atmospheric electricity, and tests it, and of course theorizes that lightning is electricity, and proposes a test for it. With the proof that lightning was electrical in nature, as Franklin had theorized, and following an experiment that he designed, the Royal Society of London gave him the Copley Medal, which is the most prestigious scientific award of the 18th century. It's like our Nobel Prize today.

His personality was sound as well. Of those people I've mentioned—Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Franklin—the only one who makes fun of himself, time and again, is Franklin. He jokes about himself, he tells about his mistakes, he tells things that other people hide, and are ashamed of in their lives.

CP: Today, of course, Franklin's fame is as great as or greater than it ever was. It sometimes seems to reach absurd proportions, especially in Philadelphia. What do you think of it all?

Lemay: It seems to me to be entirely appropriate, especially in Philadelphia, as you say. Matthew Arnold visited in the 19th century, and gave a talk at the University of Pennsylvania, and said that it should be called the University of Franklin. And of course, Franklin started the university, and proposed the best 18th-century program for studies that existed. That was in addition to starting the American Philosophical Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Hospital and other institutions.

CP: Of course, there are a lot of Franklin writers who aren't as admiring as you are. The Inquirer just had an article about David Waldstreicher, a Temple history professor who complains about the "downplaying of the Franklin who participated in slaveholding for much of his life, and the trumpeting of his alleged activism against it in his final years." Your reaction?

Lemay: Waldstreicher would like to blame Franklin for the existence of slavery in the world.

CP: When can we expect the rest of the biography?

Lemay: Well, I'm almost done with Volume III, and it should appear some time next year. It takes me roughly three years per volume, and I'll have four to go, so that's 12 more years at least—if I live to 83! Franklin lived till he was 84, so that's a good omen.