Founding Daughter

What if the noble words of the Declaration of Independence were not written by Thomas Jefferson, but by an author of much lower station still aspiring to be free? What if "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" was the idea of an especially precocious, bookish, half-Black, teenaged servant girl with a boundless faith in the ideas of the Enlightenment?

In a grimy, frigid flat in post-revolutionary Paris, in the days of ruin after Napoleon, an old man named Temple Franklin lies dying in squalor and misery. Born into privilege and family eminence, he has nothing to look back on but a life of debauchery and waste.

Adrift on an ocean of regret and paralyzed by fear of divine judgment, Temple decides to unleash onto the world a secret from his youth he has kept entombed in memory for decades. It is a secret likely to upend the historical reputation of his sainted grandfather Benjamin Franklin, and to unmask the perversity at the heart of the nation that old Ben was instrumental in establishing.

Set amid the revolutionary ferment of Philadelphia in 1776, Founding Daughter is packed with familiar figures like Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, and Paine. But they all take a back seat to the compelling love story between starstruck young Temple Franklin, an actual historical figure, and exuberant, idealistic Charlotte "Lottie" Berbich, a literary creation inspired in part by the life of young 18th-century Black poet Phillis Wheatley. Faithful to history-except when it's not-this story is a galvanizing reminder that American ideals, as articulated in our nation's founding documents, belongs to all Americans, especially to those still struggling to be free.