Summary of Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin

Get the Summary of Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us - an ambitious urban entrepreneur who rose up the social ladder, from leather-aproned shopkeeper to dining with kings.In best-selling author Walter Isaacson's vivid and witty full-scale biography, we discover why Franklin turns to us from history's stage with eyes that twinkle from behind his new-fangled spectacles. In Benjamin Franklin, Isaacson shows how Franklin defines both his own time and ours.The most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself. America's first great publicist, he was consciously trying to create a new American archetype. In the process, he carefully crafted his own persona, portrayed it in public, and polished it for posterity. His guiding principle was a "e;dislike of everything that tended to debase the spirit of the common people"e;. Few of his fellow founders felt this comfort with democracy so fully, and none so intuitively