[A]t the age of 24, Benjamin becomes the head of his own business,
without having saved any money, without having worked unusually hard,
without having omitted any of the pleasures beloved by imaginative
youth, and without having lived up to any of the maxims for which he is
later to become renowned. -from "Chapter XI: Philadelphia's Youngest
Master-Printer" It's with equal measures of unstinting respect and
gentle reproach that renowned biographer Phillips Russell tackles the
life of one of the legendary figures of colonial America and the
Revolution, a figure he deems "mirthful, generous, open-minded, learned,
tolerant, and humor-loving...the first American man of the world." A
delight to read, this is a cheerful, warmly admiring recounting of the
story of the printer and the politician, the debaucher and the diplomat,
a man whose "chief weakness" was a lack of aptitude for mathematics, who
was "not above looking to the church to do police duty over his
womenfolk," who was "midwife at the birth of the world's first great
republic." Profusely illustrated and bursting with the author's
enthusiasm as well as its subject's abundant personality, this is a
classic of American historical literature. American journalist CHARLES
PHILLIPS RUSSELL (1883-1974) was a newspaper editor and professor of
English and journalism at the University of North Carolina in Chapel
Hill. He is the author of numerous books, including biographies of
Thomas Jefferson, John Paul Jones, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William the
Conqueror.
