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Margaret Cousinswas an editor and author of short stories and novels for children. In her career, she worked at Good Housekeeping and McCall's. She was also senior editor at Doubleday and was fiction and book editor at The Ladies' Home Journal. Cousins is the author of the Landmark BooksBen Franklin of Old PhiladelphiaandThe Story of Thomas Alva Edison. She died in 1996.
As a sympathetic, conversational account of Benjamin Franklin's life, this is a lively catalog of his remarkable inventions as well as an appraisal of his stature as an editor and statesman. Shifting from well-paced narrative to exposition, a deep and intimate interest in Franklin's personality emerges as the author writes of his boyhood quarrels with his tyrant brother James, his decision to come to Philadelphia and the eventual opening of his own printing shop, the insatiable curiosity about his surroundings that led him to improve the police, fire prevention and street lighting systems, to invent a stove, a the welfare of others and of his country which in turn made him most loved and most successful as an American statesman- foreign and domestic. But dwelling for example, on the antagonisms against Franklin incurred in England during his negotiations for the repeal of the Stamp Act, this is more than a simple eulogy and gives the sense of Revolutionary urgency and deeds as molded by and in turn molding Franklin's warm personality. (Kirkus Reviews)
