The story of Benjamin Franklin begins very rightly "in the small house on Milk Street in Boston where there lived the good and pious candlemaker whose name was Josiah Franklin. He was neither rich nor poor but he was a good tradesman, and the Lord had given him a virtuous wife and a blessing of seventeen children all counted."

Benjamin was one of the youngest of those seventeen, but he it was who turned his back on his father's candlemaking and after several years as apprentice in his brother's print shop ran away. The story of this famous runaway, of his arrival, almost penniless, in Philadelphia, and of his steady rise to wealth and fame is closely woven into the fabric of our American history, past and present.

The stories of Franklin are legion, so also are the many legacies we have of his inventiveness, his thrift, his wit and wisdom. In pictures which glow with color and which reflect not only Franklin's own character and sense of humor but their own, the d'Aulaires have followed Franklin's career as it developed against a background of the demands — both political and practical — of colonial and Revolutionary America. And as an added spice to the story and pictures, they have included — in typical Pennsylvania Dutch decorations — a series of Poor Richard's own sayings.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, as presented in pictures and text by the d'Aulaire's does not take on new stature — that was not needed — but certainly a new freshness and pungent character which will make him popular today with young readers as he was in early Philadelphia, London, or the courts of France.

From the dust jacket