Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (ISAACSON, Walter)

Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us, the one who seems made of flesh rather than marble. In this authoritative and engrossing full-scale biography, Walter Isaacson shows how the most fascinating of America’s founders helped define our national character.

In a sweeping narrative that follows Franklin’s life from Boston to Philadelphia to London and Paris and back, Isaacson chronicles the adventures of the spunky runaway apprentice who became, during his 84-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.

Above all, Isaacson shows how Franklin’s unwavering faith in the wisdom of the common citizen and his instinctive appreciation for the possibilities of democracy helped to forge an American national identity based on the virtues and values of its middle class.

“THE MOST READABLE FULL-LENGTH FRANKLIN BIOGRAPHY AVAILABLE” —The Washington Post Book World

“Energetic, entertaining, and worldly.” —The New Yorker

“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 York Times

WALTER ISAACSON, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, has been the chairman of CNN and the managing editor of Time magazine. He is the author of Steve Jobs, Einstein: His Life and Universe, and Kissinger: A Biography, and is the coauthor, with Evan Thomas, of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He and his wife live in Washington, D.C.