Benjamin Franklin was one of those rare people whose influence on American life was so wide-ranging that we keep meeting up with him today at every turn, despite the fact that he has been dead for 213 years.

Walter Isaacson tells us in this detailed and insightful biography that each time we patronize a lending library, smile at a political cartoon, accept home delivery of our mail or contribute to a matching-fund drive, we are building on something that Ben Franklin started. And not surprisingly the barometer of Franklin's posthumous reputation, which has gone up and down with changes in American fortunes, is still in flux today. The commentators Isaacson cites, both pro and con, range from Franklin's own contemporaries to John Updike, Thomas Pynchon and Groucho Marx.

Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute and author of a biography of Henry Kissinger, sees Franklin as the perfect exemplar of American middle-class virtues. He was, says Isaacson, a "natural shopkeeper" and "quintessential networker" who valued hard work and frugality while dreading alike "rabble rule" and titled elites. He was a practical artisan-experimenter rather than a deepthink theorist. He found religion useful mainly because it tended to make men act virtuously rather than for any of its claims --- to him highly doubtful --- of divine sanction. He was the American proconsul for the French Enlightenment.

He was a sexual dabbler but not, at least provably, a libertine. His relations with his own wife and children were oddly distant and dispassionate. In politics he looked for what worked rather than what suited high-flown theories of government. Isaacson sums up this aspect of Franklin's life work in a pithy sentence: "Compromisers may not make great heroes, but they do make democracies."

His attitude as his country drifted toward revolution was also pragmatic. At first he was a loyal British subject, insisting that whatever differences arose across the Atlantic divide were between two branches of one indissoluble family. Only quite late in the game did he convert to the revolutionary cause --- and then, with typical insight and energy, he worked to get the 13 colonies to unite as one body instead of continuing to act as 13 individual and mutually suspicious entities. Our nation's first political cartoon was his famous drawing of a snake divided into 13 parts labeled with the names of the colonies under the slogan "Join or Die."

Franklin's own marriage, which lasted some 44 years, was a common-law union without benefit of any ceremony. He spent 15 of the last 17 years of his life an ocean apart from his wife, and he did not attend the weddings of either of his two children. The sad tale of his estrangement from his illegitimate son William, who remained a British loyalist during the Revolution, is told here in detail. Isaacson makes a further remark that goes a goodly way to illuminate Franklin's personality and character: "He would lose many male friends, but he never lost a female one."

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN is vividly written and packed with quotable anecdotes. Isaacson has mined Franklin's writings for all sorts of juicy tidbits and spread them out for us like dishes at a delightful picnic buffet. My favorite lesser-known maxim from POOR RICHARD'S ALMANAC: "There are more old drunkards than old doctors." He also gives due credit to Franklin's gift as a homespun humorist, quoting with relish some of the pamphlets that he produced under pseudonyms to poke fun at ideas he thought were ridiculous.

This fine biography sets Franklin before us in a fully rounded portrait, with due notice paid to his shortcomings and those occasions on which he acted with more guile than wisdom. All of the familiar Franklin set pieces are here: Poor Richard, the famous kite-flying experiment, his diplomatic feats at home and abroad. But Isaacson's canvas is much wider, and he fills it out with gusto.

The next time you're lucky enough to look at a $1,000 bill, take note of the Franklin portrait that graces it. If Walter Isaacson is right, Ben may wink back at you.