Stacy Schiff. Le Premier Américain: Benjamin Franklin in France

In December 1776, Benjamin Franklin undertook the greatest gamble of his career.  The American colonies had declared independence but were without money, munitions, or gunpowder. Amid great secrecy, Franklin crossed the wintry Atlantic to solicit aid from the French monarchy. He was 70 years old, without any diplomatic training, and possessing only the most rudimentary French. The eight years he spent cultivating an alliance with France serve not only as his most vital service to his country - it was largely on account of Franklin’s charisma and ingenuity that France underwrote the American Revolution - but as the most revealing of the man. His French mission would prove the most inventive act in a lifetime of astonishing inventions.

Stacy Schiff provides a dazzling narrative of Franklin’s time in France, one of the least-explored chapters of his life, in A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the American Revolution (Holt, 2005).  The book garnered numerous prizes including the George Washington Book Prize, the Ambassador Award in American Studies, and the Gilbert Chinard Prize, and was named a best book of the year in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, and The Economist. “Franklin,” starring Michael Douglas, is based on Schiff’s book, with a screenplay by Emmy Award-winner Kirk Ellis and directed by Emmy-award winner Tim Van Patten. 

In the 250th year anniversary of the American Republic, it is timely to remember how this Founding Father produced and nurtured the alliance to which America owes her independence.

Stacy Schiff is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, whose most recent work is The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, hailed as “enthralling” by The New York Times, a “tour de force” by The Wall Street Journal, and “superb” by NPR, and appearing on most 2022 best-of lists, including President Obama’s. Schiff is the author as well of The Witches: Salem, 1692, which The New York Times hailed as “an almost novelistic, thriller-like narrative,” and Cleopatra: A Life, published to great acclaim in 2010 and translated into 30 languages. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Brad Gooch called her “perhaps the most seductive writer of nonfiction prose in America in our time.” Schiff’s other titles include Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; and Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist.  Schiff has also written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Los Angeles Times, among other publications.

She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and was a Director’s Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Among her many other honors, she was named a Library Lion by the New York Public Library and a Boston Public Library Literary Light.  Awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she was inducted into the Academy in 2019. In 2024 she was presented with the Prescott Award for Excellence in Historical Writing by the Massachusetts Historical Society. Schiff was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2018.

In the 250th year anniversary of the American Republic, it is timely to remember how this Founding Father produced and nurtured the alliance to which America owes her independence.

The Distinguished Speaker series honors eminent scholars whose work has had an important impact on their field of study. This series was created by the family of Eugene Sheffer to honor his commitment to the Columbia Maison Française, which he directed from 1942 to 1966.

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