NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - From Pulitzer Prize-winning author
Edmund Morris comes a revelatory new biography of Thomas Alva Edison,
the most prolific genius in American history.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time - Publishers
Weekly - Kirkus Reviews
Although Thomas Alva Edison was the most famous American of his time,
and remains an international name today, he is mostly remembered only
for the gift of universal electric light. His invention of the first
practical incandescent lamp 140 years ago so dazzled the world--already
reeling from his invention of the phonograph and dozens of other
revolutionary devices--that it cast a shadow over his later
achievements. In all, this near-deaf genius ("I haven't heard a bird
sing since I was twelve years old") patented 1,093 inventions, not
including others, such as the X-ray fluoroscope, that he left unlicensed
for the benefit of medicine.
One of the achievements of this staggering new biography, the first
major life of Edison in more than twenty years, is that it portrays the
unknown Edison--the philosopher, the futurist, the chemist, the
botanist, the wartime defense adviser, the founder of nearly 250
companies--as fully as it deconstructs the Edison of mythological
memory. Edmund Morris, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National
Book Award, brings to the task all the interpretive acuity and literary
elegance that distinguished his previous biographies of Theodore
Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Ludwig van Beethoven. A trained musician,
Morris is especially well equipped to recount Edison's fifty-year
obsession with recording technology and his pioneering advances in the
synchronization of movies and sound. Morris sweeps aside conspiratorial
theories positing an enmity between Edison and Nikola Tesla and presents
proof of their mutually admiring, if wary, relationship.
Enlightened by seven years of research among the five million pages of
original documents preserved in Edison's huge laboratory at West Orange,
New Jersey, and privileged access to family papers still held in trust,
Morris is also able to bring his subject to life on the page--the adored
yet autocratic and often neglectful husband of two wives and father of
six children. If the great man who emerges from it is less a sentimental
hero than an overwhelming force of nature, driven onward by compulsive
creativity, then Edison is at last getting his biographical due.
