Stealing God’s Thunder is a concise, richly detailed biography of Benjamin Franklin viewed through the lens of his scientific inquiry and its ramifications for American democracy. Today we think of Benjamin Franklin as a founder of American independence who also dabbled in science. But in Franklin’s day it was otherwise. Long before he was an eminent statesman, he was famous for his revolutionary scientific work, especially his experiments with lightning and electricity.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Philip Dray uses the evolution of Franklin’s scientific curiosity and empirical thinking as a metaphor for America’s struggle to establish its fundamental values. Set against the backdrop of the Enlightenment and America’s pursuit of political equality for all, Stealing God’s Thunder recounts how Franklin unlocked one of the greatest natural mysteries of his day, the seemingly unknowable powers of electricity and lightning. Rich in historic detail and based on numerous primary sources, Stealing God’s Thunder is a fascinating original look at one of our most beloved and complex founding fathers.

"Americans tend to regard Franklin's scientific accomplishments as an interesting sideline. In his own time, however, Franklin was lionized abroad as the man who solved the age-old mystery of lightning, one of nature's most fearsome power displays. It was a great victory for the Enlightenment.... Mr. Dray, in the book's most absorbing pages, details not only Franklin's experiments but the intellectual and religious setting in which he worked."—The New York Times

"To the familiar Franklin as writer, printer, politician, and diplomat, Philip Dray adds a marvelous portrait of Franklin as scientist, justly acclaimed in his own day for his innovative study of electricity. A well-told tale that will interest readers of all descriptions."
—Mary Beth Norton, author of In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692

"Philip Dray has coaxed the familiar toward new dimensions and succeeded in making the complex entirely, enthrallingly clear. This is a wise and lucid book, vastly informative, and a pleasure to read."
—Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Vera and the forthcoming First American: Dr. Franklin Goes to France

"Benjamin Franklin appears to be in the ascendance as one of the most interesting and accessible Founders. Dray's new entry in the Franklin sweepstakes is elegantly written, mercifully free of the scholarly jargon Franklin would have made fun of, but wise and scholarly in the best sense of the term. STEALING GOD'S THUNDER strikes me as the best study of Franklin as a scientist ever written."
— Joseph J. Ellis

"Philip Dray captures the genius and ingenuity of Franklin's scientific thinking, and then does something even more fascinating: he shows how science shaped his diplomacy, politics and Enlightenment philosophy."
—Walter Isaacson

 
PHILIP DRAY is the author of At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award and the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.