Nick Bunker

Harvard Book Store and Mass Humanities welcome author and historian NICK BUNKER—whose book An Empire on the Edge was a Pulitzer Prize finalist—for a discussion of his latest book, Young Benjamin Franklin: The Birth of Ingenuity.

About Young Benjamin Franklin

From his early career as a printer and journalist to his scientific work and his role as a founder of a new republic, Benjamin Franklin has always seemed the inevitable embodiment of American ingenuity. But in his youth he had to make his way through a harsh colonial world where he fought many battles: with his rivals, but also with his wayward emotions. Taking Franklin to the age of forty-one, when he made his first electrical discoveries, Bunker goes behind the legend to reveal the sources of his passion for knowledge.

Always trying to balance virtue against ambition, Franklin emerges as a brilliant but flawed human being, made from the conflicts of an age of slavery as well as reason. With archival material from both sides of the Atlantic, we see Franklin in Boston, London, and Philadelphia, as he develops his formula for greatness. A tale of science, politics, war, and religion, this is also a story about Franklin's forebears: the talented family of English craftsmen who produced America's favorite genius.

Praise

"To pass yourself off as a self-made man is to head off questions about your origins. Nick Bunker is wise enough not to take Franklin at his word and resourceful enough to have unearthed his family’s past. The result is a robust, graceful half-life, a portrait of the young Franklin that casts fresh light on his energy, his boundless curiosity, his passion for the new—and the self-made." —Stacy Schiff, author of Cleopatra: A Life and The Witches: Salem, 1692

"Make room on the top shelf of all Franklin biographies. Bunker here provides a stunning reappraisal of America’s most self-created genius, loaded with Franklinesque wisdom on every page, carried forward on the wings of words that simply sing." —Joseph Ellis, author of The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789

"No Founding Father worked harder than Benjamin Franklin to establish a reputation as that most American (and enigmatic) of types: the self-made man. But as Nick Bunker brilliantly demonstrates in this fascinating new biography of the scientist as a conflicted young man, Franklin’s past—in particular, his family’s past in England—followed him every step of the way." —Nathaniel Philbrick, author of In the Heart of the Sea and Valiant Ambition