Ben Franklin, Boston punk

But take a closer look at the 18-year-old.

He's just broken a signed contract with his brother, broken his sworn word to his father, and run away from home. He's a kid on the lam, hungry and alone. He's got a full head of hair, bulging arms from working a printing press day and night, and - above all else - an attitude. He's a rebel, in trouble with the law and in perpetual opposition to the status quo.

That Ben Franklin, that punk, learned what he needed to know in Boston.

His father and mother wanted him to be a preacher. There was a set route for that in the early 18th century: a boy went to Boston Latin, then Harvard, then entered the Puritan establishment. Ben went off to Latin at age 8, excelled (he says), and then dropped out after his first year. He claims the tuition was too high for his father, a prosperous tradesman. It may also have been that the youngster was already questioning Puritan values. Or he may just have been a troublemaker. "I was generally a Leader among the Boys," he writes, "and sometimes led them into Scrapes."

He goes to a "writing school" for a year, where he learns the three R's, then drops out, again. At age 10, he becomes an apprentice to his father. He helps watch over the great iron pots that are constantly bubbling in the main room of the family house, pots full of animal fat being reduced to make candles and soap. It's hot, greasy work, and the boy does it 14 hours a day, six days a week. He spends the Sabbath in church, listening to hours of sermons. It's a respectable life; he's learning a respectable trade; and he hates it.

Boston feels like a trap. It's a little outpost at the edge of an enormous continent. The nearby forests have all been leveled for lumber, so wood has to be imported from Maine, and it's dependent on England for most manufactured goods. Infant mortality is 50 percent, and disastrous fires and epidemics periodically sweep through. The city is as constricted and bound as a boy in his father's soap business. "You have no rights," the royal governor explains to the colony, "but not to be sold for slaves."

In Boston, in the 1720s, one historian writes, "almost every problem and conflict. . . erupted violently, nearly destroying the townpeople's traditional values." Is that what the city taught? Is that how Franklin learned?

By the time he's 16, he's apprenticed to his older brother (who, he writes, "had often beaten me") and has figured out a way to mock Puritan values. Two-hundred-and-eighty-seven years ago this April, under the pseudonym Silence Dogood, he started publishing essays that made fun of the church, of Harvard, of popular fashion, and of prudes. He champions freedom of thought and speech and attacks religious hypocrites who "ruin their Country for God's sake."

Mimicking the ruling class, he develops a prose style that's part biting wit, part feigned ignorance. As his nom de plume Silence Dogood makes fun of the city's leading Puritan minister, Cotton Mather (and his "Essays to do good"), so Franklin has found his voice by contrasting the city's pomposities to a tradesman's down-to-earth logic.

By the time he's 18, Ben has given (in his own words) "[the] Rulers some Rubs" and needs to get out of town. He breaks his apprenticeship and sneaks away. A new life begins in Philadelphia as a printer, author, scientist, and statesman.

But under his carefully constructed mask of respectability beats the heart of a Boston rebel.

Daniel Wolff's new book is "How Lincoln Learned to Read: 12 Great Americans and the Educations That Made Them."