Benjamin Franklin

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.