“Franklin comes alive in these pages... The illustrations are carefully selected and superbly reproduced,”
—The New York Times

When he died in April, 1790, at the age of eighty-four, 20,000 people escorted him to his grave. The House of Representatives declared a month of official mourning for the selftaught genius who had risen from printer's apprentice to America’s most revered statesman.
“Americans who lived during and after the Revolution regarded Franklin as the father of our country,” the Editors write in the Foreword. “He was the only American to sign all four of the documents testifying to our nation’s birth... by the middle of the last century’, Franklin’s reputation had changed: he was regarded then as the great American moralist.... In recent times Franklin has been looked upon as a scientist and a humanitarian. The truth is that he was all of these things. He was the Universal Man of American history. ”
In this book, Frank R. Donovan portrays Franklin in his many roles: the printer, “always better than his competitors”; the businessman, “so far superior to his competition that he made a fortune by the age of 42”; the publisher of Poor Richard's Almanacks the author of a distinguished autobiography; the discoverer of positive and negative electricity; the inventor of bifocal lenses; the diplomat who won vital aid from France for the struggling colonists during the Revolution; and finally, the senior statesman guiding his country’s destiny.