How We Rediscovered a Founding Father

It's no accident that the Benjamin Franklin you see on our cover is portrayed as a kind of action hero. Of all the founding fathers, he was early America's boldest intellectual adventurer, making history in every realm from science to business to statesmanship. "My goal," says artist Michael Deas, who painted the cover, "was to present Franklin as a vigorous, flesh-and-blood person, not the somewhat frumpy figure we see on the face of a $100 bill." During the 84 years of his amazing life, it was a rare moment that Franklin, young or old, wasn't hatching an innovation that would shape American life. For that reason we chose him as this year's subject of our annual Making of America issue, which began last year with a bicentennial look at the incredible journey of Lewis and Clark.

As a scientific and social pioneer, Franklin was no less intrepid than the explorers. "Every generation should look anew at Franklin," says Walter Isaacson, my predecessor as managing editor of TIME and the author of a splendid new biography, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. "He speaks to us in a contemporary way, and we can learn a lot about our own values by the way we see them reflected in Franklin." In an adaptation from his book, Walter explores Franklin's seven revolutionary ideals in a way that offers remarkable resonance with today's headlines.

Franklin's life had profoundly varying chapters. Pulitzer-prizewinning biographer Stacy Schiff, who is writing a book on Franklin's years as emissary to France, tells how America's first Renaissance man charmed the French into becoming an indispensable source of money and military might in the war for independence. "We wouldn't have a country today were it not for France and the wizardry of Franklin," she says. Author Claude-Anne Lopez, who writes for us about the women in Franklin's life, began her long career as a Franklin expert by translating his correspondence from French to English. Says she: "I basked in Franklin's relationships with the stars of the Enlightenment, the scientists, the economists and the Parisiennes who taught him how to flirt." Closer to home, our reporter Heather Won Tesoriero offers a traveler's guide to Franklin's adopted hometown of Philadelphia, where signs of Ben's legacy are indelible.

Steve Koepp, who launched this series, supervised a team that included senior editor Christopher John Farley, art director Tom Miller, photo editor Robert Stevens and correspondent Andrea Dorfman. As part-time historians, our journalists are following a Time Inc. tradition. It was 50 years ago that our founder Henry Luce made a donation that launched The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, the Yale-based project that is about to produce its 37th volume. Ten more volumes are expected. We hope you'll find our portrait of the man as fascinating as he was prolific.