Benjamin Franklin
Kevin J. HayesThe action-packed life of the polymath and ‘First American’, Benjamin Franklin.
All Franklin biographers face a major challenge: they must compete with their subject. In one of the greatest autobiographies in world literature, Benjamin Franklin has already told his own story, and previous biographers have often taken Franklin at his word. In this exciting new account, Kevin J. Hayes takes a different approach.
Hayes begins when Franklin is eighteen and stranded in London, describing how the collections of curiosities he viewed there fundamentally shaped Franklin’s intellectual and personal outlook. Subsequent chapters take in Franklin’s career as a printer, his scientific activities, his role as a colonial agent, his participation in the American Revolution, his service as a diplomat and his participation in the Constitutional Convention.
The action-packed life of the polymath and ‘First American’, Benjamin Franklin.
All Franklin biographers face a major challenge: they must compete with their subject. In one of the greatest autobiographies in world literature, Benjamin Franklin has already told his own story, and previous biographers have often taken Franklin at his word. In this exciting new account, Kevin J. Hayes takes a different approach.
Hayes begins when Franklin is eighteen and stranded in London, describing how the collections of curiosities he viewed there fundamentally shaped Franklin’s intellectual and personal outlook. Subsequent chapters take in Franklin’s career as a printer, his scientific activities, his role as a colonial agent, his participation in the American Revolution, his service as a diplomat and his participation in the Constitutional Convention.
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Benjamin Franklin provides the reader with a solid chronology of Franklin’s life that makes for a good read in a relatively few pages. Hayes offers the origins of Franklin’s intellect but also how Franklin grew from his experiences and so gained courage and self-confidence . . . Hayes writes of Franklin in an honest and humanizing account not unlike how Franklin wrote of himself . . . a credible summary of its subject’s life.
'New York Journal of Books
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Hayes has published a shorter Life of Franklin for the Reaktion Critical Lives series, where he records the political career in vivid detail, together with a mass of fresh anecdotes and Franklins coarser jokes.
'London Review of Books
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among all the books on this popular and charming figure who remains the quintessential rags-to-riches story in American folklore, Hayes' volume is a reliable, readable, and well-executed introduction to Franklin in the wide variety of contexts in which he operated.
'History Journal
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Kevin J. Hayes has given us an engaging companion to Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, and much more. From interesting stories and oft-omitted facts, Hayes weaves a rich and colourful tapestry of each act of a life that Franklin himself compared to a play. Informative and insightful, well-researched and marvellously comprehensive for its brevity, Hayes’s book is pound-for-pound one of the best introductions to our greatest American Founder.
'Associate Professor of Politics, Hillsdale College, Michigan, and author of Benjamin Franklin, Natural Right, and the Art of Virtue'
A recipient of the George Washington Prize, Kevin J. Hayes lives and writes in Toledo, Ohio. He has published widely on American literature, history and culture, including Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain in Reaktion’s Critical Lives series.
