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This article belongs to the new field of biography as history. Far from restricting itself to the narrative account of Joel Barlow’s life and works, it tries to capture the various facets of this man with all the contradictions which were inherent in his character and fate, and which he shared with his Enlightenment contemporaries. As happened with a large number of great political actors in the history of mankind, Barlow’s background, as well as his rather mediocre “genius”, raises the essential question of how and why such an ordinary man achieved so singular a role in the extraordinary history of his time, to the point of finding himself right in the eye of the Napoleonic cyclone which eventually killed him.