Description

The action-packed life of the polymath and ‘First American’, Benjamin Franklin.

All Franklin biographers face a major challenge: they must compete with their subject. In one of the greatest autobiographies in world literature, Benjamin Franklin has already told his own story, and previous biographers have often taken Franklin at his word. In this exciting new account, Kevin J. Hayes takes a different approach.

Hayes begins when Franklin is eighteen and stranded in London, describing how the collections of curiosities he viewed there fundamentally shaped Franklin’s intellectual and personal outlook. Subsequent chapters take in Franklin’s career as a printer, his scientific activities, his role as a colonial agent, his participation in the American Revolution, his service as a diplomat and his participation in the Constitutional Convention.