Esmond Wright – författare

The most original and most delightful of the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin was publisher and printer, essayist and author, businessman and “general,” scientist and philologist, politician and diplomat, moralist and sage—and a thoroughly rational patriot who was a major force in winning his country’s independence and securing its life in the Constitution. Born poor in Cotton Mather’s Boston, he was soon at ease in Quaker Philadelphia, and later in royal London, and in elegant Paris. Born with no advantages, he died wealthy and esteemed. He was the quintessential American, almost totally free of the limits of his environment, ready to accept any challenge, to speculate, experiment, and question.Esmond Wright, the distinguished English scholar of America, sees Franklin as an Old England Man and a reluctant revolutionary; civilized, urbane, devious, and on occasion just a little unscrupulous. For, despite his charm and genius, Franklin was not admired by everybody. His contemporary John Adams thought little of his political abilities, and the Federalist pamphleteer William Cobbett called him a “crafty and lecherous old hypocrite.” In the next century, Mark Twain, Hawthorne, and Melville did not value him; still later, D. H. Lawrence despised the middle-class morality he promoted. Many today deplore his lack of interest in the arts or metaphysics, his lack of passionate commitment, his opportunism, his occasional coarseness. Yet his success in business, his many-faceted public career, his ingenious inventions and world-renowned scientific genius, his splendid prose style, his worldly wisdom, and the attractive personality that shines through his remarks and writings, made Benjamin Franklin the “new man” of the eighteenth-century dream and also vastly appealing to the modern temper. Wright’s new biography presents a fully rounded portrait of this remarkable man for all ages.This first comprehensive biography of Franklin in fifty years has taken advantage of Yale’s massive edition-in-progress of Franklin’s papers and of the many specialized studies inspired by the correspondence. Franklin of Philadelphia, designed for the general reader, is also a work for scholars, for the author appends a thorough analysis of other interpretations of Franklin’s career and personality.

This is a history of the region now known as the United States of America, from earliest times to the American victory over the British and the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The book charts the arrival of the first Americans through Alaska, millennia before the coming of the Norsemen, or of Cabot, Columbus and Raleigh. It tells of the sixteenth century incursions by the Spanish, French and English, their interaction with the American Indians, and describes the early settlements, their culture, activities and trade. The author traces the rise to dominance of the British settlers, and the establishment of the whole of east America within the British Empire. The book closes with an account of the war with the British and of Washington's final triumph.

This volume begins in a period in which bitterness and revenge vied with hope and a new ideal of liberty. The Reconstruction imposed by the North upon the South is examined by the author from all points of view. He traces the steps by which the economy recovered and by which the USA emerged as the world's industrial giant. Factors as various as the anarchy of the Wild West and the gold rush, the completion of the railroad system, the maturing of the great centers of learning, the numerous manifestations of opportunity and strength led to the formation of a distinct culture and to a new consciousness of nationhood. They also gave birth, Professor Wright argues, to the American Dream, an elusive idea of such force that it informed much of the twentieth century in the USA and, as American power became pre-eminent, influenced the world at large. After describing the key American involvement in the European, Pacific and Asian wars, and the development of culture, politics, and ideology at home, the author examines the dissipation of that dream in the disillusion and corruption of the Reagan years. Ironically, this was the time when the USA emerged as the world's sole super-power. And the country remained - as it had been for almost all its history - the ideal destination for the poor and downtrodden of the world, a beacon of opportunity, hope and, above all, of liberty.