There have been numerous biographies of Benjamin Franklin, including his own notorious autobiography. This is the most charming and captivating account of all. Every chapter is a bewitching gem, and Franklin lives and breathes on every page. This is the last book in Catherine Drinker Bowen's brilliant career. With this, she did not intend to write a full narrative biography. Instead she proposed to write "only what interested me about this most consistently...

"From one of our most accomplished and widely admired historians--a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin's youngest sister, Jane, whose obscurity and poverty were matched only by her brother's fame and wealth but who, like him, was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator. Making use of an astonishing cache of little-studied material, including documents, objects, and portraits only just discovered,...

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin distills the complex and passionate intellectual strivings of the man whom David Hume called the first philosopher and great man of letters of the New World. Benjamin Franklin was a true renaissance man. A statesman and a diplomat, (he wa the person to sign all four major documents of the founding of America - The Declaration of Indepence, the Constitution, the Treaty of Alliance with France, and the Treary of...