Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

Of all America's founders, Benjamin Franklin is the one who feels most alive, most recognizably human, most present across his eighty-four years of astonishing accomplishment. He was a runaway apprentice who became the new nation's finest writer, its most celebrated scientist, its canniest diplomat, and one of its most effective political architects. He charmed the courts of Europe, helped negotiate the alliance with France that made American independence possible, and brought the same restless intelligence that produced the lightning rod and bifocals to the drafting of a Constitution that has endured for two and a half centuries. In this sweeping full-scale biography, Walter Isaacson follows Franklin from the streets of Boston to the printing shops of Philadelphia, the salons of London, and the glittering social world of Paris, revealing how a self-made man of modest origins helped shape the American character at its most formative moment. He explores the wit behind Poor Richard's Almanac, the pragmatic genius behind Franklin's diplomatic maneuvering, and the enduring tension between his public idealism and his private complications. Authoritative, richly detailed, and compulsively readable, this is an essential portrait of the founder who most fully embodied the possibilities, and the contradictions, of the American experiment.