Also her bubbly, girlish enthusiasm, generosity to young people and wicked sense of humor—refreshing, and in some ways unexpected, in a literary lioness of her stature.

“She had a wonderful combination of seriousness and gaiety,” said the foreign-policy writer David Rieff, who grew up with Epstein often nearby, as she was a friend of his late mother, Susan Sontag. “That was very attractive and moving and interesting about her.”

The critic Daniel Mendelsohn, Epstein’s friend for many years, said that he never showed up at Epstein’s apartment on the Upper West Side without a bottle of Veuve Clicquot on hand.

“She would open the door, and she’d have this electrified look on her face and say, ‘Oh, goody! Let’s have some champagne,’” he said.

They often ate dinner in her kitchen, gossiping and trading stories. On other occasions, they met at Café des Artistes (near Epstein’s home) or Café Luxembourg (near his). She would usually order a glass of champagne, and “she loved to order a steak.”

Mr. Mendelsohn said Epstein was “a formidable editor” and “incredibly supportive of younger writers.” According to her friends, she continued to work until very close to the end of her life.

Epstein leaves a great imprint on the literary world and on several generations of writers. After co-founding The New York Review of Books in 1962, she spent the next four decades consumed with editing and encouraging, polishing and cajoling some of the great voices of the time, from W.S. Pritchard to Edmund Wilson and Gore Vidal.

“She represents something in our culture, particularly in our New York literary culture, and it’s a little chilling to know that that’s gone,” said the former editor in chief of Knopf Robert Gottlieb.

“She only took writers that she liked to edit, that she liked to read, and editing just meant reading,” said Mr. Vidal, speaking by phone from the lobby of a hotel in Rome. “And sort of like the British monarch has only three powers—the monarch in the case of Queen Elizabeth has the power to advise government, to encourage and to warn—she was like the monarch [of the] New York Review. She never exerted any power beyond those powers. And I don’t know anybody who worked with her who objected to it.”

Epstein was known to shun the spotlight—Robert Boynton, the director of N.Y.U.’s magazine-journalism program, said she wouldn’t sit for a profile of her that he’d wanted to write for The New Yorker five years ago—subscribing to an increasingly rare editors’ code that reserved celebrity for the writers.

“She was a very stylish editor, who was able to let the writer say precisely what he wanted to say and not to interfere, but to enrich his understanding of his own subject,” said Edmund Morgan, emeritus professor of history at Yale, whose friendship with Epstein goes back more than 40 years.

“She had a tremendous influence on the way one wrote, because of her sense of language,” said another of her authors, the novelist Darryl Pinckney. “That was the reason she was friends with so many poets since her youth. Her language was like a poet’s, and she had the ear of a genius, so as an editor she could always purify your prose .... It was sort of less coarse when Barbara got finished with it.”

With her co-editor, Robert Silvers, Epstein had recently presided over a special resurgence at the Review, partially the result of the journal’s matchless intellectual engagement with the present war in Iraq.

And if Mr. Silvers is known among those who know these things for having shepherded many of the Review’s most searing pieces about the war in Iraq and the media’s failure to report on W.M.D. and torture, Epstein, to those who knew her, was also a political force to be reckoned with.

“She was very much concerned with what was happening to the world, and not very happy about it,” said Mr. Morgan. “And that’s something that affected her life a great deal.”

According to Mr. Mendelsohn, politics was never very far off the agenda during their long conversations. “She was a very strong person of the left in an old-fashioned way,” he said. “One was always talking about Bush, whatever the current events were. She had a very strong sense of outrage at the shenanigans of the current administration.”

Pankaj Mishra, a contributor to the Review and one of Epstein’s formidable young discoveries, recalled that after the last Presidential election, Epstein’s feelings ran so deep that she had “an almost physical reaction to events that she felt would have harmful consequences.”

“I remember meeting her during the long Gore-Bush standoff in Florida in late 2000,” wrote Mr. Mishra in an e-mail. “She had a very hoarse voice and looked slightly unwell. She confessed slightly guiltily that she had been very anxious, not sleeping well, and smoking very hard. I still remember her saying, ‘Terrible things will happen in this country if Bush gets elected.’”

These discoveries were also the hallmark of the editor’s genuine generosity. Mark Danner, a professor at Berkeley and one of the Review’s contributors, remembers making a blind cold call to the publication’s offices right after he graduated from Harvard. It was Friday evening, and of course Epstein answered the phone. “I kind of stammered out, ‘Oh, I just got out of college ... maybe you need someone?’” Mr. Danner said. “And she did this very direct and amusing interview of me: ‘What did you study? Who are you? What do you read?’” Mr. Danner limped through the conversation for about half an hour, and Epstein said, as she often did to keen youngsters: “Why don’t you come down to talk to us?”

“Barbara never stopped taking an interest in young writers,” wrote Lorin Stein, an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, in an e-mail. “She loved to recruit new reviewers, and she always wanted to know what we were reading, which writers we thought we were important. Then she’d actually go and *read* our recommendations—and in my experience she was always ready to fall in love.

“She called me the morning after she started reading Mary Gaitskill’s last novel, just to say how much she was enjoying it. She never gave up on literature or relaxed into nostalgia. I think this inspired us all.”

“What I would also say about her is that she was a person who was always a lot of fun,” said Mr. Morgan. “I never talked with her without coming away feeling better about the human race because it had such a person in it.”

Then he addressed himself to the reporter.

“You never met her, did you?” he asked. “You missed something.”

Have the Founding Fathers ever had so much attention? In the mid- to late 90's, you could hardly open a newspaper without reading a lurid story about Thomas Jefferson, the Great Miscegenator.Acouple years ago, Alexander Hamilton enjoyed a brief vogue. Then, in 2001, John Adams was lovingly rehabilitated by the most powerful instrument known to the history profession: David McCullough's deep baritone, speaking slowly into a tape recorder about homespun American virtues.

As Ray Davies sang, "Who's going to be the next in line?" The answer appears to be Benjamin Franklin, and a fine choice it is. There's never been an F.F. more complex, more supple, more elusive to the plodding archivist. Smarter than Jefferson, more famous than Washington, more fun by far than Adams-there was nothing this über -American couldn't or didn't do. And yet he's languished over the past few decades, relatively neglected by historians and general readers-like Jerry Lewis in The King of Comedy , a victim of his recognizability. To visit his grave in Philadelphia-a bare stone in a lonely churchyard, near a busy road flooded with tour buses on their way to the Liberty Bell-is to receive a lesson in fame and forgetfulness.

Franklin's facial is being applied by the eminent and emeritus Yale University historian, Edmund S. Morgan. Mr. Morgan is well-positioned to do justice to the great man. He has been writing brilliantly about the 18th century for five decades now. His works, too numerous to list here, include American Slavery, American Freedom (1975) and a number of excellent smaller books. He's the chairman of the administrative board of the Franklin Papers at Yale, a vast publishing project encompassing tens of thousands of documents, stretching back to the first volume's publication in 1959, and still trying to catch up with Franklin's long life of writing. Now Mr. Morgan turns to the difficult challenge of summarizing our least easily digested founder in a short, accessible format.

Franklin's got a lot going for him. He's the only founder we call by his nickname-Ben. He loved bawdy jokes, and wrote essays about sex and farting that might still have trouble clearing the censors. He loved the ladies, and they, mysteriously, loved him back-all the more as he settled into elderly lechery. He was a brilliant satirist, and his gnomic utterances in Poor Richard's Almanack still reward the reader who searches them out (from 1737: "the greatest monarch on the proudest throne, is oblig'd to sit upon his own arse"). He was a great inventor, a tinkerer with systems, including the Anglo-American empire. As a scientist, he discovered new forces that he unleashed into the ether, including not only electricity but, just as significantly, democracy. As much as any founder, he can claim to have invented America-and he's the only one who signed all of our founding documents, including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the treaty of alliance with France, and the treaty with England that ended the war.

Yet, for all that, the "universal smoke doctor" (he dabbled in chimney design) is maddeningly elusive. John Adams called him "the old conjuror"-and this was not intended as a compliment. In one of his many cranky moments, Adams wrote, "the life of Dr. Franklin was a Scene of continual Discipation." Many others hated him, on both sides of the Atlantic, and his elusiveness is still reflected in the way we read about him. H.W. Brands wrote a decent biography a couple years back, and it more or less sank like a stone. Joe Ellis included Franklin in Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation , but Ben didn't really fit; he was older, more continental, more of a self-made man than any of the others. To go back to the last serious biography of Franklin that sold well, you have to go a long way indeed-to Catherine Drinker Bowen's The Most Dangerous Man in America (1974), or maybe even to Carl Van Doren's Benjamin Franklin (1938).

Mr. Morgan jumps right into the void, reminding us efficiently why we owe so much to this man. He resurrects facts that will appeal to new readers, including Franklin's great prowess at swimming and his invention of a musical instrument called the glass armonica-an instrument that might have succeeded better if he'd spelled the name with an "h." He manages to convey one of Franklin's best qualities, the limitless curiosity and scientific wonderment that allowed him to see more deeply into the world around him than anyone else alive in America.

Mr. Morgan is particularly good at surveying the political scene, and he sketches cleanly for us some of the intractable problems of the 1750's and 1760's. This is quite helpful, since we tend to treat the American Revolution as a unique event achieved by heroic Americans, their every act ordained by God. In Mr. Morgan's hands, it's a bureaucratic tangle, the result of several generations of boneheaded English administrators of the empire. He skillfully conveys Franklin's deep reluctance to push for independence at first (he called the empire "the greatest Political Structure Human Wisdom ever yet erected"), and his disgust for the petty government functionaries who eventually turned him into a firebrand. Throughout the book, you can almost hear the sound of a quill pen frantically scratching out arguments on parchment, and Mr. Morgan's great strength is that he has read every one of the thousands of letters that passed to and from Franklin.

But for all his command of the facts, Mr. Morgan falters in his depiction of the man himself. There's precious little of the sexual electricity that Franklin also spent his life discovering. There's not much on his emotional life-the alternating currents of modesty and rage that seem to have flowed through him from childhood on. Throughout the book, Franklin is eminently, relentlessly "useful," to use a word that Franklin himself loved and D.H. Lawrence hated (his hilarious riposte to "Old Daddy Franklin" should be read by anyone weary of our ancestor-worship). Franklin is a stalwart of the community, a diligent conciliator, a doting grandfather. But where's the young boy who sold out his older brother by running away from his apprenticeship? The cur who fathered a child out of wedlock? The dandy whose early portrait reveals a social climber very different from the self-effacing, beaver-hatted patriarch we have come to love?

Usually, writers of accessible biographies give us too much personal information; here we get too little. Why, for instance, did the man who wrote "Early to bed, early to rise … " sleep so late and party so late? What was going on with his wife, almost invisible in this book? Or his bastard son Billy, who became a prominent Tory even as his father was leading the country toward independence?

It's perhaps beneath Mr. Morgan to ask those questions, but lay readers want to know, and that's why David McCullough's books-love 'em or hate 'em-sell so well. (The Adams book is still going strong and presumably will be translated into many languages- Juan Adams ?) In fact, Franklin is far more fertile terrain for a blockbuster narrative.

But despite that quibble, this is an important book-as Gordon S. Wood says in his blurb, "the best short biography of Franklin ever written." Its spare prose and effortless command of 18th-century context go far to illuminate the political situation out of which the United States emerged. By clearing out the underbrush obscuring one of the truly great American lives, Mr. Morgan helps us to see again the many ways in which Ben Franklin's life still shapes our own.

Ted Widmer is the director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.

With our own modest or nonexistent portfolios, we are in the happy position of being tourists rather than natives to the country of high-finance finagling. The bad guys are getting it; better yet, the more extensive the wrongdoing, the more likely that heads will roll, that "systemic" changes will be made. Yet, delightful as it has been to find inarguable evidence of the villainy we'd long suspected, something in this chorus of virtuous revulsion has made me uncomfortable.

I've been doing some historical research lately, and I keep hearing echoes of this Schadenfreude in the words of some eminent literary tourists of the last century-namely Alexis de Tocqueville and Charles Dickens-over the economic misfortunes of my home state of Virginia. Despising the institution of slavery (and, in de Tocqueville's case, the landed aristocracy), they were downright jubilant at the sorry state of Virginia's economy.

De Tocqueville was as much a cheerleader for (and idealizer of) the stern probity and industry of Northerners as he was against what he perceived as the idleness and frivolity of the slave- and land-owning Virginia aristocracy-themselves, he gleefully pointed out, descendants of blue-blooded bad sheep who'd been happily shipped off by their families in England. At roughly the same point in time (in 1827), Fanny Trollope, the free-thinking novelist and mother of Anthony, arrived in America with utopian fantasies of her own. But after disillusioning experiences-a brief sojourn in a muddy, bug-infested progressive community, followed by the failure of a grandiose commercial scheme in Cincinnati-her view turned sour, and all she found was further evidence of the boorishness of America and its institutions. Having abandoned her 12-year-old son to the untender mercies of his intemperate and impecunious father, Mrs. T. wept over the treatment of slave children in Virginia. The book she wrote, Domestic Manners of the Americans , a slash-and-burn exposé, was a best-seller in England.

Dickens, on the trip that produced American Notes and Pictures from Italy (both 1842), had initially hoped to tweak and perhaps outsell his older colleague and friendly rival with a more salubrious portrait of the new country-but that was not to be.

With his nose for injustice and his genius for dramatizing and humanizing the plight of the oppressed, Dickens was more interested in prisons and poorhouses than signs of progress. After all, on his visit to Pennsylvania, after a cursory look at the historic sites, he went to the horrifyingly brutal Eastern Penitentiary and was inspired to savage eloquence by his reformer's zeal. Didn't all these writers see what they wanted to see, discover ammunition for novelistic or ideological predispositions already firmly in place? And for Dickens and Trollope, wasn't there a lingering-if unconscious-resentment of this upstart nation's victory over the powerful mother country?

In any case, Virginians have never gotten over the vilifications of Dickens, who was wined and dined in a style befitting the great man and then turned on his hosts with a keenly observant eye for the signs of misery beneath the façade.

Voyaging from Washington through Fredericksburg to Richmond by night steamer and by coach, in conditions that were at the very least uncomfortable and at the worst life-threatening, Dickens took perverse satisfaction in the "ruin and decay" that signalled the exhaustion of the soil by the slave system. "Dreary and uninteresting as its aspect is, I was glad to the heart to find anything on which one of the curses of this horrible institution has fallen; and had greater pleasure in contemplating the withered ground, than the richest and most thriving cultivation in the same place could possibly have afforded me," he wrote.

Dickens' host in Richmond was a good man and, to his relief, not a buyer or seller of slaves, though he owned and employed them in his tobacco factory. Like the guest from hell, Dickens was the kind of snoop who peers under the rugs. He observed the factory workers and sought out the poorer neighborhoods, looking for signs of moldering spirits. They were the very slums that we, growing up in a later century, tried to keep at the back of our consciousness. In the 50's and 60's, not so much had changed: Dickens' wry observations on mint juleps and sherry cobblers and deferential black waiters held true for these staples of our debutante years.

But what Dickens and de Tocqueville missed were the paradoxes: How was it that this miserable state had produced such farsighted revolutionaries as George Mason, George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe and Thomas Jefferson-had, in effect, given us the Constitution? In his superb book American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia , the historian Edmund Morgan provides a complex portrait of the ups and downs of Virginia's government and economy: its boom years of greed (stemming from tobacco), the seesawing between protecting and restricting individual rights, and the state's resort to slavery in the late 17th century, when freed servants posed a threat of rebellion. Growing up in conditions in which slaves and free men intermingled, Jefferson worried that young Virginians must inevitably be tutored in tyranny with the example of such despotism before them.

"The man must be a prodigy," Mr. Morgan quotes Jefferson as saying, "who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances." If so, there were many prodigies in Virginia: men who, while complicit in the slave trade, were hardly depraved, and managed to retain manners and morals enough to suppress private disagreements and design the Constitution around the central belief in human freedom. The ultimate irony, Mr. Morgan suggests, is that it may have been precisely this concrete spectacle of bondage in their backyards, of men treated like chattel, that fired their ideas of independence and passion for liberty.

Even then, the drafters of the Constitution knew slavery had to be abolished, but so fragile was their hold on the union itself (their first order of business) that they didn't dare raise so divisive an issue at the time. What they had, what the great Presidents like Roosevelt had, was a combination of political acumen and farsightedness.

But now, with the instant-gratification impulse that rules our lives and our economy, nobody ever remembers (or wants to remember) while the times are good that boom is followed by bust. State governments go on drunken sprees of projects and commitments and then are surprised by the head-splitting hangover of money shortfalls. I did not have to be "persuaded" of the phenomenon by the Bad Guys, as the authors of we/them readings of the current crisis like to put it. As a "little investor," my investment was tiny enough, but I too was caught up in the same "irrational exuberance," perhaps even the same "infectious greed," that had others shifting from bonds to stocks like there was no tomorrow. Maybe that's just it: We no longer believe there is a tomorrow, which is a consequence of our inability to listen to history. You need a sense of the past to believe in the future, and you must believe in the future as a shared proposition to have any hope of making it better.