Benjamin Franklin, Self-Revealed is an expansive biographical study that seeks to recover Franklin not as a marble Founding Father, but as a vivid, contradictory, and intellectually restless human being. Drawing heavily on Franklin's own writings—letters, essays, autobiography, scientific observations, and political reflections—Bruce constructs a portrait at once documentary and interpretive. The prose is measured, judicious, and characteristic of early twentieth-century historical biography, attentive to moral character, public service, and the formation of republican intelligence. William Cabell Bruce, a Maryland lawyer, historian, and later United States senator, brought to the work the habits of a jurist and a man of public affairs. His interest in Franklin was likely sharpened by his own engagement with civic institutions, law, diplomacy, and political character. Bruce's scholarly temperament favored careful evidence over mythmaking, and his study reflects an effort to let Franklin's personality emerge through the record he left behind. This book is recommended for readers interested in Franklin beyond familiar anecdotes of kites, maxims, and diplomacy. It will especially reward students of American intellectual history, biography, and Revolutionary-era political culture who value a patient, source-grounded account of a mind central to the making of modern America.

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William Cabell Bruce (1860-1946) was an American politician and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who represented the State of Maryland in the United States Senate from 1923 to 1929. Bruce was admitted to the Maryland bar the same year and commenced law practice in Baltimore, Maryland. In addition to his career in law, Bruce was also writer, and received the distinguished Pulitzer Prize in 1918 for his book Benjamin Franklin, Self-Revealed.