He was the fifteenth of seventeen kids, quit school at age ten, and spent his boyhood elbow-deep in melted candle wax, and he still grew up to help invent a country.
Before he was flying kites in thunderstorms, Ben Franklin was just a curious kid in Boston who loved books more than his father's candle shop. He taught himself to write by secretly publishing letters under a fake name, ran away from home at seventeen with almost nothing in his pockets, and built a life around one simple idea: figure it out yourself, then share what you learn.

Along the way, he invented bifocals, the lightning rod, and a better stove and gave every single one away for free. He started America's first lending library, its first volunteer fire department and became its very first postmaster general. Then he helped write the two documents that built a nation: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Told through fifteen full-color illustrated chapters, this is the real story behind "Honest Ben" the runaway, the inventor, the founder for young readers ready to meet the boy behind the man on the hundred-dollar bill.

If your child loved discovering the true story of Abraham Lincoln, this is the next stop on the journey through America's founding history.