My Favorite Americans

Ask a man who his favorite Americans are, and you learn less about the dead and more about the living. So, here are mine ... A runaway apprentice who taught a city to stop burning. A man who treated grief like a mountain ... something you climbed, not something you sat in. Two brothers who might have been our last honest shot at living in the light Three different centuries. Three different kinds of trouble. Same restless country underneath. ... Ben Franklin, the Man Who Wouldn't Sit StillFranklin never held a job when six would do. Printer. Journalist. Inventor. Diplomat. Philosopher. And, by his own quiet admission, a man who enjoyed a glass of wine and a long argument about the nature of things. He gave Philadelphia its fire department and its lending library, and gave every house within reach of a thunderstorm a lightning rod, because Franklin's genius was never invention for its own sake, it was usefulness. He wanted his ideas to do something. He was a marketer before marketing…