#  Lepore, Jill - Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin 

 





October 01, 2013

 

 

   ![lepore-book_of_ages.jpg](/sites/g/files/omnuum9191/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/history_winter_reading_list/files/lepore-book_of_ages.jpg?itok=ZZi3Q7ne) 

 

**Jill Lepore**. New York: Knopf. 2013.  
[Link](http://scholar.harvard.edu/jlepore/publications/book-ages-life-and-opinions-benjamin-franklins-sister) A Finalist for the 2013 National Book Award for Nonfiction

 From one of our most accomplished and widely admired historians, a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin’s youngest sister and a history of history itself. Like her brother, Jane Franklin was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator. Unlike him, she was a mother of twelve. Benjamin Franklin, who wrote more letters to his sister than he wrote to anyone else, was the original American self-made man; his sister spent her life caring for her children. They left very different traces behind. Making use of an amazing cache of little- studied material, including documents, objects, and portraits only just discovered, Jill Lepore brings Jane Franklin to life in a way that illuminates not only this one woman but an entire world—a world usually lost to history. [Read More...](http://scholar.harvard.edu/jlepore/publications/book-ages-life-and-opinions-benjamin-franklins-sister)

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  **Jill Lepore**  
**David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History,  
Harvard College Professor**

 Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University. She is also a staff writer at *The New Yorker.* A prize-winning professor, she teaches classes in evidence, historical methods, humanistic inquiry, and American history. Much of her scholarship explores absences and asymmetries in the historical record, with a particular emphasis on the histories and technologies of evidence and of privacy. As a wide-ranging and prolific essayist, Lepore writes about American history, law, literature, and politics. She is the author of many award-winning books and is currently writing a history of the United States. [Read more](https://scholar.harvard.edu/jlepore/jlepore/biocv).

 

 





 

 

 



 

 

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