A Great Improvisation Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

by Schiff, Stacy

• ISBN13: 9780805080094
• ISBN10: 0805080090
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-01-10
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks

Summary

When Benjamin Franklin embarked for France in 1776, he well understood that he was taking on the greatest gamble of his career. The colonies were without money, munitions, gunpowder, or common cause; dispatched amid great secrecy, across a winter sea thick with enemy cruisers, Franklin was seventy years old, without any diplomatic training, and possessed of the most rudimentary French. His eight-year posting there serves not only as Franklins most vital service to his countryit was in large part on account of his fame, charisma, and ingenuity that France underwrote the American Revolution, and it was Franklin who helped negotiate the peace of 1783but as the most revealing of the man. The French mission would prove the most inventive act in a life of astonishing inventions. In A Great Improvisation, Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff draws from new and little-known sources to illuminate the least-explored part of Franklins life. From these pages emerge a particularly human and yet fiercely determined Founding Father, as well as a profound sense of how fragile, improvisational, and international was our countrys bid for independence.

Author Biography

Stacy Schiff is the author of Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), which won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2000, and Saint-Exupery, which was a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize. Schiff's work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and The Times Literary Supplement. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Cast of Characters	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
The First Mistake in Public Business Is the Going into It 1776	p. 7
Half the Truth Is Often a Great Lie 1776-1777	p. 36
Three Can Keep a Secret, If Two of Them Are Dead 1777	p. 65
The Cat in Gloves Catches No Mice 1777-1778	p. 94
There Is No Such Thing as a Little Enemy 1778	p. 126
Admiration Is the Daughter of Ignorance 1778	p. 165
Success Has Ruined Many a Man 1779	p. 196
Everyone Has Wisdom Enough to Manage the Affairs of His Neighbors 1780	p. 229
The Sting of a Reproach Is the Truth of It 1780-1781	p. 260
Those Who in Quarrels Interpose May Get Bloody Nose 1782	p. 291
The Absent Are Never Without Fault 1783	p. 325
Creditors Have Better Memories Than Debtors 1784-1785	p. 359
Epilogue	p. 398
Chronology	p. 413
Notes	p. 419
Selected Bibliography	p. 459
Acknowledgments	p. 463
Index	p. 467
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Typically after an ocean crossing Franklin's eyes brimmed with tears at the sight of land; he had just withstood the most brutal voyage of his life. For thirty days he had pitched about violently on the wintry Atlantic, in a cramped cabin and under unremittingly dark skies. He was left with barely the strength to stand, but was to cause a sensation. Even his enemies conceded that he touched down in France like a meteor. Among American arrivals, only Charles Lindbergh could be said to have met with equal rapture, the difference being that Lindbergh was not a celebrity until he landed in Paris. At the time he set foot on French soil Benjamin Franklin was among the most famous men in the world. It was his country that was the great unknown. America was six months old; Franklin seventy years her senior. And the fate of that infant republic was, to a significant extent, in his hands.

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Excerpted from A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America by Stacy Schiff
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