num_pages: 320
description: 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.
language: English
title: The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin
titlecomplete: The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin
characters: Benjamin Franklin
genres: American, American Revolutionary War, Politics, Biography, United States, American History, Nonfiction, American Revolution, History, Biography Memoir
ratings_count: 8336
places: Paris, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
awards: awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: George Washington Book Prize, awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: Julia Ward Howe Prize
publisher: Penguin Books