Silence Dogood. Richard Saunders. Benevolus. Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim. All were pen names that allowed Franklin to say things he couldn’t have otherwise said Victoria Maxfield Benjamin Franklin’s fertile mind constantly spun off inventive and useful ideas. His lightning rod saved buildings and lives. His energy-saving improvement of the wood-burning fireplace kept families warm and forests from being leveled. His lending library extended literacy to those who couldn’t afford books. His map of the Gulf Stream made travel faster and commerce more efficient. But Franklin’s ingenuity showed most clearly in his invention, or rather recurrent reinvention, of himself. In the course of his life, Franklin devised dozens of authorial personas in print, which allowed him to challenge authority, identify folly and promote human progress with an unsparing vigor he never could have achieved under his own name. Franklin created his first alter ego when he was in his teens: a middle-aged widow named Silence Dogood . Mrs.…