The book chronicles Franklin’s rise from obscurity to become a successful editor and businessman who retired in his early forties and spent the remaining four decades of his unusually long (for the age) life as a highly influential politician, diplomat, and scientist.Īdmittedly, those with much familiarity with Franklin will not necessarily find Isaacson’s account to have as much new information as insight. I found it to be a crisply written, thorough, and sympathetic treatment of Franklin’s life which particularly sheds light on his youth, a subject about which much less has been written than the events of his later years. I picked it up due to author Walter Isaacson’s track record of producing acclaimed biographies of noteworthy individuals ( Einstein: His Life and Universe, Steve Jobs, Kissinger: A Biography). He was well-liked, outgoing, famously flirtatious even in his old age, yet among the most intellectual men of his age and seemingly able to succeed in whatever endeavor into which he entered.īenjamin Franklin: An American Life is one of the more consequential of the dozens of biographies of the man to appear in the last few decades. Perhaps this is because Franklin was perpetually curious and disarmingly candid, never hiding from himself or his posterity his passions or his indiscretions. Despite his place in our pantheon of national heroes, Franklin uniquely seems to be remembered as an approachable man-the one who more than any other could strike up conversation with someone today and even find himself at home with modern society.

Over 300 years since his birth, Benjamin Franklin still looms as one of our most familiar and beloved founding fathers.

Franklin isaacson