Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

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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 Franklins 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, Americas 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 Richards Almanac and the wisdom behind the Declaration of Independence, the new nations 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 Franklins amazing life, showing how he helped to forge the American national identity and why he has a particular resonance in the twenty-first century.

Reviews

"The New York Times Book Review" A thoroughly researched, crisply written, convincingly argued chronicle.
"The New York Times" In its common sense, clarity and accessibility, it is a fitting reflection of Franklin's sly pragmatism....This may be the book that most powerfully drives a new pendulum swing of the Franklin reputation.
"The New Yorker" Energetic, entertaining, and worldly.
"The Washington Post Book World" The most readable full-length Franklin biography available.

Author Bio

Walter Isaacson recently stepped down from his position as chairman and CEO of the CNN News Group. A journalist for more than 25 years, he previously served as Time Inc.'s editorial director and as Time magazine's managing editor, national affairs writer and political correspondent. A graduate of Harvard and Oxford University, where he was a Rhode Scholar, he is the author of Kissinger: A Biography (S&S, 1992) and co-author (with Evan Thomas) of The Wise Men: Six Friends And The World They Made (S&S, 1986).