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...

A biography of the eighteenth-century printer, publisher, inventor, scientist, and statesman who played an influential role in the early history of the United States.

Ben Franklin invents swim fins.

Why did Benjamin Franklin retire from business and become gentleman? Why did he admire the British Empire - and join the American Revolution? Why did he begin writing his Autobiography when he did? And how did the "first American" become an American in the first place? Renowned historian Gordon S. Wood spent ten years studying a legend. In this untraditional biography, he penetrates beneath 200 years' accumulation of images and representations to...

A skeptical Benjamin Franklin visits Dr. Mesmer's magic show in an attempt to use science to prove that Mesmer's special magic is, contrary to Mesmer's claims, incapable of curing disease and controlling one's thoughts.

When ten-year-old Nolan and his little sister, Olive, find Ben Franklin in their kitchen, they do their best to guide Ben through the new world he helped form.

After accidentally sucking Benjamin Franklin into twenty-first-century New Jersey with his Anytime Anywhere machine, thirteen-year-old Qwerty Stevens and his best friend almost wind up stuck in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776 when they try to send him back.

"Kathleen Krull sheds new light on the Benjamin Franklin--who considered science his true calling in life, not nation building--in this perceptive, fair-minded portrait."--

A biography of the eighteenth-century printer, inventor, and statesman who played an influential role in the early history of the United States.