Ottawa Citizen

Scholar probed lives of U.S. founders

Known best for biography of Benjamin Franklin

- HILLEL ITALIE

NEW YORK Edmund S. Morgan, a leading scholar of the colonial era who helped reinvigora­te the reputation­s of the U.S. founding fathers, probed the country’s racial and religious origins and, in his 80s, wrote a bestsellin­g biography of Benjamin Franklin, has died in Connecticu­t. He was 97.

Morgan died Monday afternoon at Yale-New Haven Hospital, where he was being treated for pneumonia, said his wife, Marie.

A professor emeritus at Yale University, he was a frequent contributo­r to The New York Review of Books and author of more than a dozen books, including Birth of the Republic, The Puritan Dilemma and Inventing the People, winner in 1989 of the Bancroft Prize. His other awards included a National Medal of the Humanities in 2000 and an honorary citation from Pulitzer Prize officials in 2006 for his “creative and deeply influentia­l body of work.”

Morgan shared Franklin’s birthday, Jan. 17, and impish spirit. The bald, round-faced historian had a prankster’s smile; a soft, sweet laugh; and a willingnes­s to poke fun at his own prestige, joking that history books bored him and that his favourite students were the ones who disagreed with him. He attributed the success of his Franklin book to “the geezer factor.”

For decades, Morgan and Harvard professor Bernard Bailyn were cited as leaders of early American studies. Joseph Ellis, who studied under Morgan at Yale, dedicated his Pulitzer Prize-winning Founding Brothers to his former teacher. Gordon Wood, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Radicalism of the American Revolution, cited Morgan for often being ahead of his time.

“When he was first writing (in the 1940s) the dominant thinking among historians was that ideas didn’t matter, that the founders only cared about the rich and that they didn’t mean what they were saying about freedom and government,” Wood told The Associated Press in 2002.

Morgan wrote several books and essays about the country’s founders, especially Franklin and George Washington, praising them not just as men of action but of inaction. He cited the “genius” of Washington in declining to seize power after the surrender of the British and found the Franklin a far more effective diplomat overseas than the ever-prepared John Adams.

An informed and accessible prose stylist, Morgan liked to imagine his readers as “ignorant geniuses,” the public knew him best for Benjamin Franklin, published in 2002 when Morgan was 86. It was a short, lively summation that began with the unlikely image of a young, athletic Franklin. Based solely on the historian’s reading of Franklin’s volumes of papers, which Morgan himself helped organize, the book sold more than 100,000 copies and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Morgan was married twice. He and his first wife, Helen M. Morgan, co-authored The Stamp Act Crisis, published in 1953. In recent years, he collaborat­ed on reviews and essays with his second wife, Marie Morgan.

 ?? BOB CHILD/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ?? Edmund S. Morgan, a scholar of the colonial era, helped reinvigora­te the reputation­s of the U.S. founding fathers.
BOB CHILD/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Edmund S. Morgan, a scholar of the colonial era, helped reinvigora­te the reputation­s of the U.S. founding fathers.

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from Canada