Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

Franklin’s most important vision: an American national identity based on the virtues and values of its middle class.

villages of rural England: men who possessed property and wealth but were not members of the titled aristocracy. Proud but without great pretension, assertive of their rights as members of an independent middle class, these freeholders came to be known as franklins, from the Middle English word “frankeleyn,” meaning freeman.1