Washington College Magazine
Franklin Wins The Washington
Perhaps fitting for the inventive, prickly and freethinking Founding Father whose 300th birthday America celebrates this year, the second annual George Washington Book Prize was awarded to a book on Benjamin Franklin.
Stacy Shiff will give the George Washington Book Prize Lecture at WC on September 14.
During the May 23 ceremonies at Washington's Mount Vernon estate, author Stacy Schiff accepted the $50,000 award for her book, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, published in 2005.
Schiff, winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for biography, tells the story of the eight years Franklin spent in France beginning in 1776 wooing French support for the American War for Independence.
"In this time of renewed interest in the founding period, it is especially gratifying to be recognized for my efforts to bring a little-known chapter of Ben Franklin's life to light," said Schiff. "To receive this significant award at the home of another illustrious founder is a true honor."
In A Great Improvisation, Schiff draws from new and not widely known sources to illuminate the least-explored part of Franklin's life, examining an unfamiliar chapter of the Revolution, a tale of American infighting and the backroom dealings at Versailles that would propel George Washington from near decimation at Valley Forge to victory at Yorktown.
A particularly human and yet fiercely determined Founding Father emerges as readers come to understand the fragile, improvisational and international nature of our country's bid for independence.
"In sparkling prose, burnished to a high gloss, Stacy Schiff tells the tale of Benjamin Franklin in Paris with piquant humor, outrageous anecdotes worthy of the fi nest French farce, and a wealth of lapidary observations... C'est magnifique," said Ron Chernow, winner of last year's prize for Alexander Hamilton.
The event at Mount Vernon also celebrated the works of the two other finalists, Edward Lengel for General George Washington: A Military Life, and Stanley Weintraub for Iron Tears: America's Battle for Freedom, Britain's Quagmire: 1775-1783.
"In each work selected, the jury saw refreshing perspectives on our nation's founding era," said Ted Widmer, director of Washington College's C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, which administers the prize.
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