Poor Richard's Lament: A Most Timely Tale

Poor Richard's Lament grants Franklin his wish.

Benjamin Franklin has been confined to a private apartment in the Plantation of the Unrepentant for the past two-plus centuries, and has recently received notice that his petition for final processing has at last been approved. In the company of two Intermediaries, Ben appears before a panel of examiners in the Celestial Court of Petitions to make his case. His examiners are three former arch-adversaries: John Adams, Alexander Wedderburn, and Reverend William Smith.

By the end of Ben's examination, in which the sins of the Pater are brought devastatingly to light, Ben fully expects to be cast into the abyss. Instead, he's invited to bear witness to what has become of America in the two-plus centuries of his absence. Ben's odyssey of witness begins at his birth site in Boston, passes through New York (where Ben upstages a leadership conference at the Waldorf Astoria), and ends, with wrenching poignancy, at his gravesite in Philadelphia.

Interwoven into the main story is a second, beginning in the red-carpeted parlors of the West Wing and ending in the blood-stained streets of West Philadelphia. Eventually, the parallel stories collide, like tectonic plates, in a stunning series of shocks and aftershocks.

Following in the traditions of Dicken's A Christmas Carol, Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, and Dante's Divine Comedy, Poor Richard's Lament, nine years in the making, is an intricately woven, ultimately uplifting, tale of revelation and redemption, written in close consonance with the avuncular and aphoristic persona of Benjamin Franklin, Printer.