A lively, insightful biography of Benjamin Franklin's crucial formative years--largely overlooked by previous biographers--that vividly recounts how he became, and almost didn’t become, the great figure we know today.

From his early success as a printer to his landmark experiments with electricity to his diplomacy in France during the Revolution, Benjamin Franklin has always seemed the inevitable embodiment of American ingenuity. But in his twenties and thirties, before his scientific discoveries made him famous, though he was already brilliant and precocious, he was also impulsive and inexperienced. Now, Nick Bunker sheds new light on Franklin during these years, making clear how essential they were in his rise to greatness. We see how Franklin learned from mistakes and made the most of his good luck. Bunker also explores Franklin's years in London, when he was exposed to the truly intellectual culture he determined to re-create on his side of the Atlantic. And, for the first time, Bunker explores Franklin's family roots in England challenging the conventional wisdom that he came from nothing. Here is a riveting, intimate, and wonderfully humanizing portrait of one of America’s great and lasting heroes.