Work
Franklin is the author or editor of nineteen books and hundreds of articles on culture and history published in more than a hundred different academic journals, major magazines and newspapers, reference works, and anthologies. He has given over five hundred addresses on college campuses, on radio and TV shows, and at academic conferences, museums, and libraries; he has participated in the making of four films.
Franklin’s main subject is American history and culture; his work aims at interdisciplinarity and broad public accessibility. He started out as a scholar of Herman Melville; his first book, The Wake of the Gods: Melville’s Mythology, which has been in print since its publication in 1963, examines Melville's use of mythologies most 20th-Century scholars are not familiar with: one expects references to Judaeo-Christian or Greco-Roman lore, but Melville's intellectual milieu was well-informed on many other cultures, from Meso-American to Sanskrit. In addition, Franklin produced a scholarly edition of Melville's The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, which traces many obscure classical and "alien" references embedded in Melville's prose. This has recently been reprinted, but its numerous and tendentious footnotes may annoy readers who prefer to experience Melville in his own words.
His second book, Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century (1966), which has gone through several editions and been widely adopted as a classroom text, inaugurated the serious study of science fiction and identified such classic American authors as Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville as pioneers of this genre, hitherto largely neglected by literary critics. His Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction won awards in 1981 and 1983; in 1990 he was named the Distinguished Scholar for the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. In 1991. he was Guest Curator for the “Star Trek and the Sixties" exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution; this show subsequently traveled to the Hayden Planetarium.
Prison Literature in America: The Victim as Criminal and Artist established Franklin as a leading authority on American prison literature. Released in 1989 into an expanded third edition, this book has been widely used by historians, penologists, literary critics, and sociologists. Franklin’s 1998 anthology Prison Writing in 20th-Century America is a basic classroom text.
In his 1988 War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination, Franklin turned his interest in science fiction to an examination of the American fascination with superweapons. His book presents a view that, ironically, from Robert Fulton’s submarine Nautilus in the 18th century to the death-dealing weaponry of the late 20th century, superweapons ostensibly designed to end war have proved capable of exterminating the human species. The expanded 2008 edition explores how this cultural history led to the seemingly permanent state of warfare of the 21st century. War Stars is informed by Franklin’s own earlier experience as a former navigator and intelligence officer in the Strategic Air Command.
Franklin has been publishing on the history of the Vietnam War and its role in American literature and culture since 1966. His M.I.A., or Mythmaking in America, and his co-edited Vietnam and America: A Documented History have been widely used in courses on the Vietnam War. His 2000 book Vietnam and Other American Fantasies synthesizes this previous work and extends it into an overview of 21st-century American culture. One of Franklin's major themes in writing about Vietnam is that the supposed existence of surviving U.S. prisoners of war in Vietnam after the war is a myth created after 1980 with the aid or tacit approval of the Reagan White House, and that the psychological foundation of the myth arguably lies in the justifications the Nixon White House offered for the Vietnam War in the years before 1973: namely, that it was a war to bring the POWs home.
Franklin’s most recent book, The Most Important Fish in the Sea: Menhaden and America (2007), is an interdisciplinary study of the role of menhaden in American environmental, economic, social, political, and cultural history from the 17th into the 21st centuries.
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