Franklin in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associ

Kevin J. Hayes is a professor of English at the University of Central Oklahoma and author of several books, including The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson and The Mind of a Patriot: Patrick Henry and the World of Ideas. With Edwin Wolf 2d, he coauthored The Library of Benjamin Franklin.Isabelle Bour is a professor of eighteenth-century English studies at the Sorbonne. She is the editor of J. G. Lockhart'sThe History of Matthew Wald and M. de La Coste's Voyage philosophique d'Angleterre and co-translator of Emilie du Châtelet's Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings, among others.

In his time Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was the most famous American in the world. Even those personally unacquainted with the man knew him as the author of" Poor Richard's Almanack," as a pioneer in the study of electricity and a major figure in the American Enlightenment, as the creator of such life-changing innovations as the lightning rod and America's first circulating library, and as a leader of the American Revolution. His friends also knew him as a brilliant conversationalist, a great wit, an intellectual filled with curiosity, and most of all a master anecdotist whose vast store of knowledge complemented his conversational skills. In "Franklin in His Own Time," by reprinting the original documents in which those anecdotes occur, Kevin Hayes and Isabelle Bour restore those oft-told stories to their cultural contexts to create a comprehensive narrative of his life and work.