Benjamin Franklin

David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) was an English novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, literary critic, travel writer, essayist, and painter.

Born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, on September 11, 1885, his modernist works reflect on modernity, social alienation and industrialization, while championing sexuality, vitality and instinct. Four of his most famous novels — Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)— were the subject of censorship trials for their radical portrayals of romance, sexuality and use of explicit language.

Lawrence's opinions and artistic preferences earned him a controversial reputation; he endured contemporary persecution and public misrepresentation of his creative work throughout his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile that he described as a "savage enough pilgrimage". At the time of his death, he had been variously scorned as tasteless, avant-garde, and a pornographer who had only garnered success for erotica; however, English novelist and critic Edward Morgan Forster challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation". Later, English literary critic Frank Raymond Leavis also championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness.

From Lawrence's fundamental literary critical work Studies in Classic American Literature, published in 1923, we have selected his important study on Benjamin Franklin, which we offer to our readers today. It is a biting and sarcastic text, typical of Lawrence's style, from which the figure of Franklin does not emerge intact and free from heavy criticism.

According to Lawrence, «Benjamin, in his sagacity, knew that the breaking of the old world was a long process. In the depths of his own underconsciousness he hated England, he hated Europe, he hated the whole corpus of the European being. He wanted to be American. But you can't change your nature and mode of consciousness like changing your shoes. It is a gradual shedding. Years must go by, and centuries must elapse before you have finished. Like a son escaping from the domination of his parents. The escape is not just one rupture. It is a long and half-secret process. So with the American. He was a European when he first went over the Atlantic. He is in the main a recreant European still. From Benjamin Franklin to Woodrow Wilson may be a long stride, but it is a stride along the same road. There is no new road. The same old road, become dreary and futile. Theoretic and materialistic».