Benjamin Franklin, in Two Volumes (The Library of American Freedoms)

xvi, 845 pp., paginated continuously. Blue leatherette bindings, gilt titles and decorations, all edges gilt, marbled endpapers. 2001 reissue of the 1938 first trade edition of Van Doren's biography. Extensive bibliography and index follows text. From his beginnings as a journalist at age 16, to his retirement from public affairs at 82, there was no break in Benjamin Franklin's activity and accomplishments. A writer, inventor, and statesman, he remains unsurpassed in the range of his natural gifts and the important uses to which he put them. In this Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Carl Van Doren incorporates materials from Franklin's letters, manuscripts, journals, and published works to give the most accurate and comprehensive portrait ever written of this great American.