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Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
Walter Isaacson
Biography of a popular founding father
Simon and Schuster
March 2004
608 pages
ISBN: 074325807X
Paperback
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Non-Fiction Biography
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.
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