Kevin J. Hayes, "Undaunted Mind: The Intellectual Life of Benjamin Franklin" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Caleb Zachron, editor of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Kevin J. Hayes about his book, Undaunted Mind, The Intellectual Life of Benjamin Franklin. Kevin is emeritus professor of English at the University of Central Oklahoma, one of early America's most brilliant inventors. Ben Franklin lived an incredibly interesting life. How did a mind like Franklin's develop? How did Ben Franklin become the genius they remember him for today?

Kevin's biography focuses on the books and friends that Franklin engaged with throughout his life. In many ways, it's the perfect biography to feature in the New Books Network, as it emphasizes the role that books play in shaping one's mind. Kevin, thanks for joining me today to speak about Undaunted Mind.

Thank you for having me. Of course, I'm really thrilled to get the chance to speak to you. Ben Franklin has been one of those people that has always fascinated me my entire life. I think when you're a kid and you're learning about in America and you're learning about... the Founding Fathers. There's something about Ben Franklin that's just really intriguing. I think it might be that there's some great lore around the electricity in the kite and all sorts of different...

interesting quirks of his character. But before talking about Franklin, I was wondering if you just tell us about yourself and your background. Well, I went to the University of Delaware for graduate school. And it was my intention to study American literature. And I didn't know much about early American literature. But I had the great fortune to have as my teacher, Leo LeMay, who was the greatest Franklin scholar in the country at that time.

And he really taught me a lot about Franklin. And the more I learned, the more amazed I became at the number of accomplishments that Franklin did. And the more I wanted to study more about Franklin. Yeah, Franklin is fascinating. That's quite fortunate that you had that opportunity. For this particular book, then, how did you come to write it?

When I was in graduate school at the University of Delaware, I did for my doctoral dissertation a book called The Library of William Byrd. And so I reconstructed the library of Byrd, who had the greatest library in the colonial South. And ever since then, books and reading has become my main specialty. And I've looked at other... and other prominent early American figures like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and studied their books and their readings.

And it was just a natural thing to turn to Franklin. What is the process like for studying someone's personal library? Is it a matter of just... taking stock of the book? Are you looking at the marginalia? Are you looking at things that they might have referenced? What is the actual process and procedure that you would take? Well, with Franklin's, it was especially complicated because his...

His books were sold after his death, and his library was widely dispersed. Now, in the 1950s, Edwin Wolfe, a great bookman in Philadelphia, started reconstructing Franklin's library. And he spent several decades on the project and sadly died before he finished reconstructing Franklin's library. And so as the Franklin tricentenary approach to 2006...

John Van Horn, the current director of the Library Company of Philadelphia, invited me to complete Edwin Wolff's work. And so I had the great fortune to finish reconstructing his catalog and see it into publication in 2006. And so that gave me the basic framework of all the books that Franklin had owned and read. And ever since that thing was published in 2006, I thought, well, my work on Franklin is done.

But strangely, not many people have worked with the catalog since its publication. I think that many people find it intimidated or they're not quite sure what to do with it. And so it ultimately reached a point where I thought to myself, well, heck, if no one else has got to do it, I will. And so I'll write the intellectual biography of Benjamin Franklin. How does an intellectual biography compare to, you know, a standard biography?

Well, with the standard biography, what you're doing is you're looking at all the aspects of a person's life, or at least all the aspects that make him important and worth reading about. Whereas intellectual biography, I specifically look at Franklin's intellectual life, the books he read, the writings he wrote, the intellectual friendships that he made in America and in London.

in France and look at his, try and understand the conversations that he had and the intellectual ideas that were exchanged between Franklin and many of the other intellectuals of his day.

You look at his very early reading habits. What was Franklin reading when he was just a small boy? Well, Franklin's early reading was very similar to what many other people of his... generation were reading. And these were things that were called chapbooks or Chapman's books. Now, Chapman was an itinerant bookseller who traveled across the colonial America selling these inexpensive little books.

Many of them were children's books, but many others weren't. But often they were called histories, which didn't mean that they were literally histories, but they were storybooks. And so... It's a tricky thing when you're trying to study this because you may come across a reference in a contemporary document to small histories, and it doesn't mean small histories at all. It means little storybooks.

Like Jack and the Beanstalk and others, stories that we still know and read as children today. Right, yeah. And you also then look a little bit later during, you know, that was obviously reading that he did for fun or just, you know, to learn how to read. You also look at his early education. He attended Boston Latin School. What was his experience like in school?

Well, Franklin made the most of what he could when he was in school because he was only in grammar school for one year. And the whole point of sending someone to grammar school was to teach them, have them learn Latin. to get him ready to go to Harvard or to go to college. And after one year at grammar school, Franklin's father pulled him out of school and said, well, I'm not sending him to Harvard. And so there's no point in him going to grammar school anymore.

Now Franklin made the most of it because, I mean, when he was in, for that one year he was in school, he advanced two grades. And so he essentially went through three years of coursework within one year. So he really... made the most out of it, although he was heartbroken when his father took him out of school so soon. But Franklin did get a good basic understanding of Latin, and I think one thing that I note in the book is that he had a much better...

reading knowledge of Latin than most people realize or make out to be, because he was really accomplished in all languages, but learned Latin pretty quickly. It's definitely very interesting. Yeah, it's a one no, but my grandfather attended Boston Latin School. So I thought that was a fun thing to see. Not like it's still very bearing. Yeah, it's incredible. I mean, and I think it's still, you know, it's still its reputation.

Still one of the, you know, one of being one of the best public schools in America. But what's so fascinating about, about Franklin, I think is, is, is ability to teach himself. The fact that he was such a curious person that he really didn't need school, I think, even if he enjoyed it. How did he continue reading and learning even after leaving school?

Well, after leaving school, then his wife, he went into another school for another year, but that was just a kind of what's called a venture school. And it didn't teach Latin and Greek, but it taught more basic subjects, writing and arithmetic and like that.

And so he went to that adventure school for another year. But then after that, his father took him out of school and turned him into an apprentice. And so he apprenticed him with his brother, James. And that's where he really learned, did a lot of reading. I mean, James had an excellent office library, and Franklin could read a ton of books in his spare time at his brother's office. What were some of the books that he was reading in this period?

Well, one of the big ones he was reading was Pliny's Natural History, and that was a huge folio book, but Franklin read it, I think, cover to cover, and he remembered parts of it years later. And so... That's the first one that comes to my mind. But there were lots of other volumes of poetry, some of the most popular poetry of the time, Milton and Pope. And then there were also lots of... pamphlets from the ones that say his brother

published at that time. And so Franklin really had a wide variety of history and poetry and travel literature that he read when he was a child. And what about in his first... first real working life working with the new england current what was that like for him well that too is another um important part of his reading life because His brother James had this great circle of contributors to his newspaper, the Courantiers they're called, and they were all very accomplished writers.

and wrote some excellent and very funny and entertaining essays for the Quran. Franklin read them over and over again. I mean, he was the one who set them in type when they first went into the newspaper, and then he read them again when he proofread them. And maybe he read them again later after the...

newspaper was distributed. And so, you know, a lot of those essays from the Quarantiers, he read at least three times while they were in press. And so they really influenced his own writing style as well. Would you describe what his style of writing was like during this period? Well, in his autobiography, he mentions that he learned...

One of the important ways he learned to write was by reading The Spectator, the great early 18th century British weekly periodical, and to a certain extent that it's true. But I think that there's more of an impishness to Franklin's writing. He was a... He was a hoaxer from the very early days of his writing, and he always had fun playing with the reader and trying to...

put one over on the reader, and all the time. I mean, he was writing hoaxes from an early age. And also, too, he assumed a lot of different personae when he wrote. I mean, one of his best-known ones are the Silence Do Good essays. Now, he assumed the persona of a middle-aged Boston woman, and he wrote from that perspective, even though he was only 16 years old at that time.

And it really shows an indication of Franklin's writerly skill that he was able to use so many different voices over the course of his writing. That's fascinating and quite funny. I could almost imagine him writing to the Onion. today. He's such a fascinating person. And, you know, he's a person that he obviously starts in Massachusetts, but, you know,

travels from there. What was it like for him leaving Boston? And what did he read, especially once he got to London? Well, we got to give him to Philadelphia first. Let's start in Philadelphia then. Yeah, he was tired of his brother taking advantage of him and beating him all the time, and Franklin had reached a point.

uh as in his apprenticeship that he had learned all he was going to learn from his brother and so he he broke his indenture and and left uh and and headed to first he went to new york and he couldn't find work there and so then he went to philadelphia and found work as an uh as a dirty man apprentice in philadelphia and you know that's he really fell in love with the city and it you know it really became his home

from that time forward um and he's so much a part of of philadelphia now i mean he's oh you always think of franklin in philadelphia you don't think of franklin in boston really not very much anymore um but in His time in Philadelphia put him in contact with lots more books and lots more bookish people. When he first moved there, he made good friends with about four young men of about the same age as he was.

And they got together on the weekends and exchanged books and talked books and wrote little pieces for each other and so really enjoyed one another's company. And then Franklin later... with some of those guys and some others formed a self-improvement club called the Jinto, which really became an important part of his life as well. And then from there, what did he continue to read? Well, he...

He read a lot of the books that were popular at that time. A lot of poetry by Alexander Pope. That's the first poet that comes to mind. But also, besides the spectator essays, he read all the other essays that were available. I mean, those were some of the most popular and most well-respected writings.

I mean, this was really, I mean, we're still in the early 18th century, but it was really before novels emerged as an important force. And even after the novels started being published in the mid 18th century, you know, many people looked down on them. Franklin. He read some of the, you know, some of the great works like Don Quixote, the great fictional works, but, you know, he never really read very many novels per se. What impact did London have on him and on his intellectual life?

Well, London had a huge impact on him. I mean, he went there because he befriended the governor of Pennsylvania, Governor Keith, and Keith said, well, you go to London and buy all the... printing equipment you need, and then I'll give you a letter of credit, and then I'll support your business when you come back to Philadelphia. Well...

Governor Keith talked a good game, but he had more promises than cash. And Franklin ended up in London with no money and no letters of credit, no letters of recommendation. And so he was a little lost at first. But it didn't take him long to realize what he had in his hand. He had an apprenticeship in printing, and he was a skilled journeyman printer.

And so with that skill, he realized he could find work anywhere in London because they always needed good journeymen to work as printers. And so within the first couple of weeks he was in London, he got a job as a printer. a guy named Samuel Palmer's house, Samuel Palmer's printing house, and he was able to read lots of books there, not just from...

the ones that were Palmer printed. But when he and his friend James Ralph, who came to London with him, when they found lodgings in London, they ended up living right next door to a bookstore. And Franklin convinced the bookstore to loan him books to read for a nominal fee. And so Franklin had access to this great bookstore right next door to where he was living. Wow. You mentioned he's a voracious reader, but...

Do you have a sense of how much she was actually reading every single day? Because I think for the average American today, if they can read 30 minutes a day, I think that puts them well on the top.

percentiles of readers but what was his reading diet like boy i never thought about in terms of number of hours but um you know probably at least i mean because he was he had to work i mean working was was a lot of was tough as well but i still think he was probably reading two or three hours a day at least yeah yeah and it obviously uh

Without television, it's probably easier to put in that amount of work. Part of this book, the framing of it in terms of his intellectual biography, you think about in terms of the books he read, but also...

his friends. And I wonder if you talk about some of the friends, you know, for example, like you talk about, if the pronunciation is correct, the Junto, the improvement club that he formed.

Can you talk a little about some of his friendships that he used as a way to help develop himself as a person? Yeah, I mean, the jinto was an important... part of his intellectual life and it went on for many many years after he and his friends formed it now They wrote several rules for the club, but one of the things that they did was they each shared what they've been reading lately.

And so in a way, it was kind of like a modern day book club. Now, they didn't all read the same book and then talk about it, but they each talked about the different books that they read and they would share books. and in fact the gentle uh at one point franklin said well let's let's get all our books and share them and make a little library now that didn't work out very well because people were too protective of their books and they didn't want others uh

getting them all dirty and beat up. But that experience did form the basis for the library company in Philadelphia, which was a subscription library. And so all the members... bought a subscription to it, and that gave them membership in the library company, and that allowed them to borrow books and also to provide input as to which books the library would buy. that Library Company of Philadelphia is still...

still in business today. Now it's turned into a rare book research library instead of a circulating library. But, you know, it's a real testament to Franklin's foresight that, you know, here's a... an institution that he started almost 300 years ago, and it's still in business today. What were some of the works that were published? Well...

In terms of, I mean, I mentioned earlier that they didn't read very many novels or the novels weren't very well respected. But what were respected were histories. Histories were some of the most. respected kinds of literature at that time period. Now, often nowadays, we don't think of histories as literature, as somehow below the novel in terms of genres.

But it was completely different back then. Histories were the most well-respected kind of literature at that time. But then they also read travel books. Now, you know, travelers had a reputation of being liars, but they're still there. The books of travel were hugely popular at that time period. So, too, were science books. People, well-to-do, educated...

Gentlemen would, and women too, would read science books at that time. What was Poor Richard's Almanac? This is, you know, a work that Braggland helped create. What is it? And can you describe it for the listeners? Well, I mean, just like nowadays, we all have our calendars, whether they're hanging on the wall or they're on our phones. The almanacs were the calendars of the time period and the pocket calendars. Now, they also sold almanacs as one-seat almanacs to put on the wall.

But they're best known as a small pocket almanac. And so it listed the days. and listed oftentimes predictions of the weather for the different time periods. And what Franklin did in his was he... put in all these little sayings, little proverbs and things like that. And that's what they really became most known for. Now, he wasn't the first one to do this. Lots of other almanac makers did that before him. Proverbs and witty sayings really became a part of me.

oral culture. And people from reading Poor Richard's Almanac really read and remembered the little sayings that Franklin put in there. Yeah. I feel like it's also sort of... It's a legacy in a way that's been made famous by Charlie Munger, an investor who's a big fan of Franklin. Poor Charlie's Almanac, which he referenced to it, which is how I first became familiar with Franklin's work.

Yet another organization. What's so remarkable about Franklin is the extent to which organizations that he founded are still in existence today, like the American Philosophical Society. What was Franklin's idea there and how did he help contribute scientific developments in the United States through that organization? Obviously, it wasn't the United States yet. Well, Franklin was... was active with the Royal Society of London, and he thought America should have a similar organization, a group of

scientists who got together from across the colonial America and shared their ideas and contributed to one another's experiments and scientific knowledge. And so that was the... basic impetus behind the American Philosophical Society. And then it worked. I mean, it took him a little while to get going, but eventually... Franklin and John Bartram and some other scientists came together and made the organization work and shared their scientific ideas and helped to advance that.

scientific research in America. I thought he was interested in so many different topics. He was interested in education, curriculum design, publishing, science. How did he balance everything? Well, he was a hard worker. I mean, it's amazing to me how much he did. I mean, you just mentioned education. I mean, he founded the University of Pennsylvania. or what is called the University of Pennsylvania now. It was called Philadelphia Academy then, but he was the leader of that.

whole organization. The soul of the whole, one person called him when they were talking about the Philadelphia Academy. I think one thing that he enabled himself to do was he was an excellent businessman. And very good at distributing work. And he established many different partnerships throughout colonial America with other printing partners. And so...

By the time that he was in his early 40s, he had been successful enough and profitable enough that he could retire from active business and devote himself to his community improvement projects and his scientific research. And so it's something that he loved to do and he enabled himself to do by being successful in business first. And then he is able to devote himself to the community improvement projects.

What were some of the major ways that he dedicated himself to public life in this period? Well, there's a close relationship between, say, the American Philosophical Society and the library company and the politics. of the time period. And some of the leaders in those organizations also became some of the leaders in Pennsylvania government. And so there is close ties between them.

One of the greatest political leaders in colonial Pennsylvania was Isaac Norris, and he was also an excellent bookman. Norris had a great library. one of the greatest libraries in colonial Pennsylvania. And it was through their shared love of books that Franklin and Norris first became friends and first began working together as in the political realm.

And so there's a close relationship between Franklin's intellectual life and his political life. One of the major aspects of his life, too, was his travels in Europe, going back to London. also in paris how did how did this you know these various experiences for him outside of the united states as an older you know slightly older uh shape his thought and his life and his thinking about american politics well it's uh

It's a tricky thing because he loved London and he had so many good friends among Englishmen. But then he got so angry there because he saw how... Ignorant people were about America. I mean, most people in London, I mean, even though America was a colony or a set of colonies, they knew little about it. And then they had a very derogatory attitude toward it.

And so one of the things that Franklin did in London was to try and educate people. I mean, a lot of his writings that he published in the London... newspapers were propagandistic. I mean, he was basically trying to inform Londoners about America and about what America had to offer and what America was about and to try and disabuse them of their prejudices toward Americans.

Another thing is that Franklin had many friendships in London. Now, there were two dinner clubs that he was... members of one was the monday club and the other one was the thursday club and what franklin called the thursday cloud later was the club of honest wigs and so it was made up of um mostly dissenting ministers, but also some scientists and some political leaders.

That was another way for him to test out ideas and share ideas and inform people more about America and what America had to offer. Considering American political issues, one of the major issues, of course.

was it was the issue of tolerance racial tolerance and slavery uh and franklin's views you know differed from from some other founding fathers. How did Franklin think about these issues and how did his reading shape his views on tolerance and slavery? Well, Franklin owned a lot of books about slavery and about travels in Africa. And those certainly affected his thinking. I think when it comes to slavery, though, maybe his time in London was more influential because...

When he first went to London as an agent for it, well, so a second time to London. So he first went to London, you know, as an apprentice or as a journeyman printer. But then when he went back for the second time. to serve as the representative of the Pennsylvania Assembly. He went with his son, and they each brought a slave with him. And, you know, it seems almost unthinkable now, but...

Yeah, they each brought slaves with them to London to help them out. And then ironically, when Franklin was in London, he became active with the Thomas Bray Associates, which was an anti-slavery organization. And so we have this weird situation where Franklin is owning a slave in London, but then he's also becoming active with the anti-slave organization. And so... I think that he would eventually reconcile these things. I mean, after he returned to America and then he didn't own slaves anymore.

Ultimately, he got rid of his slaves. And his wife was very helpful with that because she reached a point where after Franklin took Peter, the slave to... London, and she bought a slave to help her out at home, and she became very attached to him, and the little boy died pretty young, and then Deborah Franklin became very much against slavery at that point.

So it was very influenced by his relationship, much as it was from the books, which I think is a point that you try and draw out throughout the book. It's kind of these two... aspects of his intellectual life, both the social component and influence from other people and also from books. I'm wondering how books and intellectual life influenced him and

persisted during the period of the Revolutionary War for him. One thing that I discovered as I looked through the surviving books from Franklin's life is that he didn't write in his books very much. Not like, say, John Adams, who filled his margins with notes and many times angry notes. But Franklin did not... write very much in the margins of his books until he got to the uh revolutionary period and in so in the run-up to the revolutionary war as more and more of these british

anti-American pamphlets were coming out, Franklin got really angry and you could see it in his marginalia. And so that's really the first time that I noticed it. And then... There's also too, there's this carryover to other books. And so once he'd started developing the habit of writing in the margins of his political pamphlets, then he started writing more in the margins of some of his other books as well.

One thing I noticed was there was this collection of South Sea travels that survives at the American Philosophical Society. And Franklin wrote several marginal notes in that book.

And they're just absolutely entertaining to see how he reacted to what he was reading. When you think about his entire library, can you describe it a little bit in terms of the source material? How big is his library? Was his library? And was there anything in it that you found was particularly interesting, surprising, unexpected? Well, Franklin's library was about... 4,000 volumes strong. And he had really a wide-ranging collection. I mentioned earlier the essays and the poetry.

And so that was there. Naturally, you'd expect a great science collection. And so he had a ton of scientific books, not just electricity, but in natural history and many, many different branches of science. One thing that surprised me a little was his medical book collection, which was huge. I think that Franklin may have had the biggest private medical collection of books.

in colonial america i mean i can't say that for sure but uh it was pretty impressive now in my other research i've mentioned william bird's library and bird had an excellent medical library as well but bird was a hypocampiac And so that didn't surprise me. But Franklin's Medical Library, I mean, it surprised me how big and wide and ranging it was. He also had an excellent agricultural collection.

Now, Franklin had a low farm outside of Philadelphia, so it doesn't surprise me too much that he had an agricultural library. But his agricultural library was almost as good as George Washington's. Wow. Yeah. For someone like Franklin, who lived just this unbelievable life, his stamp, his imprint is all over American history.

And continues to this day in the form of organizations like the American Philosophical Society and the University of Pennsylvania. When you think about Franklin, because he has been so well documented, there's been other biographies written about him.

You know, he wrote his own autobiography. Do you feel that you learned anything that you didn't know, you know, through this project that you didn't know before that you feel like changed your perception of him, even if only slightly? Hmm. Well, that's a tough one. You know, this book, I mentioned that part of the inspiration for this book was my work on the reconstruction of the library of Benjamin Franklin.

But I've also written another little biography of Benjamin Franklin. It's just called Benjamin Franklin. It's only 200 pages long. And that came out a couple years ago. But when I was working on that, I came up with so much more information that I could use in that book. And that's when I started getting the idea to write Undaunted Mind because I had so much information that I came up with that I hadn't put in the earlier book.

And so that's one of the influences in terms of my course of research and writing for this book. Now, one of the things that I concentrate on... in Undaunted Mind is Franklin's friendships and all of the intellectual ideas that exchanged during so many of the friendships that he made in London and in Paris and in colonial America. And I think that there's a close relationship between his reading and his social ties. And that's something that, I mean, it's hard to reconstruct.

I mean, it's one thing to reconstruct a library, but to try and reconstruct conversations that may have taken place, I mean, that's a more difficult task.

But, I mean, I think that those conversations were vital in terms of making Franklin the man who he became. Certainly. Are there any friendships of his, for example, with other famous people, other... founding fathers that that you found particularly interesting to learn more about um you know a sense of maybe what he might have thought about certain people um that might have been unexpected for you well i don't know about

whether they were unexpected. But one thing that pleased me is to see the friendship between Franklin and George Washington. Now, when Washington came to Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention, I mean, Franklin hadn't seen him for... not since 1775, when they met in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the start of the war.

But they had corresponded throughout that time period. Even when Franklin was in London and Franklin was in France, he and Washington corresponded. And when Washington came to Franklin's home in Philadelphia... at the start of the Constitutional Convention, it's like they were...

The old buddies. And, you know, it's funny. We don't, you know, this George Washington, the man of action and Franklin, the thinker. But to see those two get together and have, you know, Franklin shared his library with Washington and showed him. some of his favorite books. And it's really a special moment to me to see these two great men, these two founding fathers come together in a very personal and intimate way. Absolutely. Yeah, I think.

um you know washington is is also just such a fascinating uh figure too um i'm wondering you know for for anyone who reads your book if there are any anything that you would recommend you know that people look for when they read your book or books of the time period that Franklin read that you think are books that you might actually recommend that people go and read themselves to? Well...

I almost want to say you too can read like Benjamin Franklin. I mean, if you read my book and read the books that Franklin read. then you could use my book as a kind of reader's guide to 18th century literature. And this is something that... is absolutely appropriate. I mean, Franklin himself looked at what other people read and realized that what they read influenced what they thought and influenced their personality and the people who they became.

And so he too read books because others read them and recommended them. And so you can use my book as a kind of Franklin's guide to reading. I might do that myself, honestly. There's a lot in here and obviously Franklin.

you know, being the person that he is, certainly the type of individual that one would want to imitate, considering all he was able to achieve and do in his life. Well, Kevin, thank you so much for being guest on the New Books Network. It was really wonderful to speak with you about. your book, Undaunted Mind. Franklin is just such an amazing figure. And I think, you know, as much as anyone, he deserves an intellectual biography because, you know, what was going on...

in his conversations and in his mind and in his reading habits is honestly just as interesting as, as the things that he did and the movements that he was a part of. So thank you so much for being a guest. Well, thanks for inviting me. I enjoyed it.