The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

From the most respected chronicler of the early days of the Republic—and winner of both the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes—comes a landmark work that rescues Benjamin Franklin from a mythology that has blinded generations of Americans to the man he really was and makes sense of aspects of his life and career that would have otherwise remained mysterious. In place of the genial polymath, self-improver, and quintessential American, Gordon S. Wood reveals a figure much more ambiguous and complex—and much more interesting. Charting the passage of Franklin’s life and reputation from relative popular indifference (his death, while the occasion for mass mourning in France, was widely ignored in America) to posthumous glory, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin sheds invaluable light on the emergence of our country’s idea of itself.

• So Long, See You Tomorrow
• Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different
• The Radicalism of the American Revolution
• The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution
• The American Revolution: A History (Modern Library Chronicles)
• The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin
• The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States
• Hamlet (Cambridge School Shakespeare)
• Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson
• Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (Oxford History of the United States)