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

When Benjamin Franklin embarked for France in 1776, he well understood that he was taking the greatest gamble of his career. The colonies were without money, munitions, gunpowder, or common cause. Amid great secrecy, Franklin was dispatched to Paris to solicit aid. He was seventy years old, without any diplomatic training, and possessed of the most rudimentary French. The eight-year posting serves not only as his most vital service to his country-it was in large part on account of Franklin's fame, charisma, and ingenuity that France underwrote the American Revolution-but 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 Franklin's 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 country's bid for independence.