An intuitive understanding of the things children love to know, combined with the d'Aulaire's extraordinary artistic ability make this book on the life of one of America's most beloved founders a perennial classic. Folk art style illustrations are enhanced with pert aphorisms from Poor Richard's Almanac on each page. Readers will learn that Benjamin was the youngest of seventeen children "all counted" and that "it was a piece of luck that his kite experiment had not killed him." They will also come to know the inventor whose thirst for knowledge led him to constantly seek to improve the lives of his fellow men. Readers will follow his life as a leader in the American Revolution and ambassador to both Britain and France and learn why the French hailed him as the man who "tore the lightening from the sky and the scepter from tyrants."
The work of Ingri and Edgar D'Aulaire has needed no introduction - their beautiful picture books have delighted countless children ever since. Ingri Mortenson and Edgar Parin D'Aulaire met in Munich where both were studying art in the 1920's. Ingri had grown up in Norway; Edgar, the son of a noted portrait painter, was born in Switzerland and had lived in Paris and Florence. Shortly after their marriage, they moved to the United States and began to create the picture books that have established their reputation for unique craftsmanship. Their books were known for their vivid lasting color. a result of the pain-staking process of stone lithography used for all their American history biographies. This was an old world craft in which they were both expert, which involved actually tracing their images on large slabs of Bavarian limestone. Throughout their long careers, Ingri and Edgar worked as a team on both art and text. Their research took them to the actual places of their biographies, including the countries of Italy, Portugal and Spain when they were researching Columbus; to the hills of Virginia while they researched Washington; and to the wilds of Kentucky and Illinois for Abraham Lincoln, winner of the Caldecott Medal. The fact that they spoke 5 languages fluently served them well in their European travels and in their research of original documents. Since their deaths in the 1980's, Ingri and Edgar's books and works have been kept alive by their two sons Ola and Nils.
