Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

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 Franklin's 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, 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.

In this colorful and intimate narrative, Isaacson provides the full sweep of Franklin's amazing life, showing how he helped to forge the American national identity and why he has a particular resonance in the twenty-first century.

Author: Walter Isaacson
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 07/01/2003
Pages: 608
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.19lbs
Size: 9.55h x 6.52w x 1.67d
ISBN: 9780684807614

Accelerated Reader:
Reading Level: 10.6
Point Value: 38
Interest Level: Upper Grade
Quiz #/Name: 74606 / Benjamin Franklin: An American Life


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 05/01/2003 pg. 658
Publishers Weekly 05/12/2003 pg. 56
USA Today 05/22/2003 pg. 1
Booklist 06/01/2003 pg. 1736
Library Journal 06/15/2003 pg. 80
Entertainment Weekly 06/27/2003 pg. 143
BookPage 07/01/2003 pg. 23
New Yorker (The) 06/30/2003 pg. 96
New York Times 07/06/2003 pg. 11
People Weekly 07/14/2003 pg. 45
Newsweek 07/14/2003 pg. 58
Men's Journal 08/01/2003 pg. 28
New York Review of Books 12/04/2003 pg. 22
New York Times 12/07/2003 pg. 71
Choice 01/01/2004 pg. 974

About the Author
Walter Isaacson is the bestselling author of biographies of Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. He is a professor of history at Tulane and was CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair of CNN, and editor of Time. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2023. Visit him at Isaacson.Tulane.edu.