No American writer after Franklin would ever enjoy the same representative status that Franklin's political and intellectual achievements secured for him. Indeed, recognizing Franklin's singular position, Henry Adams framed his own autobiography as a deliberate contrast to Franklin's, characterizing himself as a young man born to prominence but achieving obscurity in a world dominated by impersonal scientific forces rather than by the cozy electrical apparatus of the late eighteenth century. It is very tempting to describe the course of American writing in institutional terms as a gradual descent from the vigorous centrality of Franklin's position to the entropic isolation of Adams, in which the communal values and familial metaphors invoked by Winthrop and deployed by Bradstreet, Crevecoeur, or Franklin himself would slowly lose their efficacy as the nineteenth century progressed.

The perception of such a fundamental discontinuity is consistent in many respects with the doubts that recent students of English and American writing have begun to express about the assumptions behind the idea of “tradition” itself. Adams's analysis of the conflict between multiplicity and unity is both a successor to Emerson's absorption in the “one” and the “two” and the forerunner of Marilyn Butler's recent argument with the concept of unifying traditions in English poetry and of Philip Gura's criticism of continuity studies in general and the tyrannous “novanglophilia” that prevails in American literary scholarship.