In this authoritative and engrossing full-scale biography, Walter
Isaacson, bestselling author of Einstein and Steve Jobs, shows how
the most fascinating of America's founders helped define our national
character.
Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us, the one who
seems made of flesh rather than marble. In a sweeping narrative that
follows Franklin's life from Boston to Philadelphia to London and Paris
and back, Walter Isaacson chronicles the adventures of the runaway
apprentice who became, over the course of his eighty-four-year life,
America's best writer, inventor, media baron, scientist, diplomat, and
business strategist, as well as one of its most practical and ingenious
political leaders. He explores the wit behind Poor Richard's Almanac
and the wisdom behind the Declaration of Independence, the new nation's
alliance with France, the treaty that ended the Revolution, and the
compromises that created a near-perfect Constitution.
In this colorful and intimate narrative, Isaacson provides the full
sweep of Franklin's amazing life, showing how he helped to forge the
American national identity and why he has a particular resonance in the
twenty-first century.