Ever prescient, John Adams rightly predicted that Benjamin Franklin would forever occupy an elevated position in the American imagination. He was, after all, the man who risked life and limb to fly a ...

Click here to read more from Slate’s History Week. On first opening Stacy Schiff’s A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, the reader may not pay much attention to the list ...

It would be difficult to conjure what the United States of America would have become without George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. One can argue it might have been stillborn. Such is the impact ...

Biographers love to write about some historical figures to the exclusion of others: Napoleon, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Thomas Jefferson. In recent years, it seems Benjamin Franklin has joined that ...

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Avaricious American authors out to capitalize on the renown of the Founding Fathers have always known to take a reading of ...

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THERE are many reasons for welcoming Mr. Van Doren’s distinguished life of Benjamin Franklin. In style and arrangement it is a biography in the best classic traditions of that art. The modesty of the ...