“In December 1776, a small boat delivered an old man to France.” So begins a dazzling narrative account of Benjamin Franklin’s French mission, the most exacting–and momentous–eight years of his life.

When Franklin embarked, the colonies were without money, munitions, gunpowder or common cause; like all adolescents, they were to discover that there was a difference between declaring independence and achieving it. To close that gap Franklin was dispatched to Paris, amid great secrecy, across a winter sea thick with enemy cruisers. He was seventy years old, without any diplomatic training, and possessed of the most rudimentary French. He was also among the most famous men in the world.

Franklin well understood that he was off on the greatest gamble of his career. But despite minimal direction from Congress he was soon outwitting the British secret service and stirring passion for a republic in an absolute monarchy.

In A Great Improvisation Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff offers an utterly fresh and thrilling account of Franklin’s Parisian adventure and of America’s debut on the world stage. Schiff weaves her tale of international intrigue from new and little-known primary sources, working from a host of diplomatic archives, family papers, and intelligence reports. From her pages emerges a particularly human Founding Father, as well as a vivid sense of how fragile, improvisational, and international was our country’ s bid for independence.

“In December 1776, a small boat delivered an old man to France.” So begins a dazzling narrative account of Benjamin Franklin’s French mission, the most exacting—and momentous—eight years of his life. 

When Franklin embarked, the colonies were without money, munitions, gunpowder, or common cause; like all adolescents, they were to discover that there was a difference between declaring independence and achieving it. To close that gap Franklin was dispatched to Paris, amid great secrecy, across a winter sea thick with enemy cruisers. He was 70 years old, without any diplomatic training, and possessed of the most rudimentary French. He was also among the most famous men in the world. 

Franklin well understood that he was off on the greatest gamble of his career. But despite minimal direction from Congress he was soon outwitting the British secret service and stirring passion for a republic in an absolute monarchy.

In A Great Improvisation Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff offers an utterly fresh and thrilling account of Franklin’s Parisian adventure and of America’s debut on the world stage. Schiff weaves her tale of international intrigue from new and little-known primary sources, working from a host of diplomatic archives, family papers, and intelligence reports. From her pages emerges a particularly human Founding Father, as well as a vivid sense of how fragile, improvisational, and international was our country’ s bid for independence.

Thomas Jefferson once asserted that “for depth of purpose, zeal, and sagacity, no man in Congress exceeded, if any equaled, Sam Adams.” John Adams called him “the most elegant writer, the most sagacious politician, and celebrated patriot perhaps of all.” But in spite of his celebrated status among America’s founding fathers as a revolutionary leader, Samuel Adams’ life and achievements have been largely overshadowed in the history books.

Now, in The Revolutionary Samuel Adams, Stacy Schiff brings her masterful skill as historian and storyteller to the life of Samuel Adams, examining his transformation from the listless, failing son of a wealthy family into the tireless, silver-tongued revolutionary who rallied the likes of John Hancock and John Adams behind him. Gripping and revelatory, this book is a long-overdue chapter in the history of the American Revolution.

Winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and hailed by critics as both “monumental” (Boston Globe) and “utterly romantic” (New York magazine), Stacy Schiff’s V+(r)ra, the story of Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov, brings to shimmering life one of the greatest literary love stories of our time. Vladimir Nabokov–the +(r)migr+(r) author of Lolita, Pale Fire, and Speak, Memory–wrote his books first for himself, second for his wifeV+(r)ra, and third for no one at all.

Set in prewar Europe and postwar America, spanning much of the twentieth century, the story of the Nabokov’s fifty-two-year marriage reads as vividly as a novel. V+(r)ra, both beautiful and brilliant, is its outsized heroine–a woman who loves as deeply and intelligently as did the great romantic heroines of Austen and Tolstoy. Stacy Schiff’s V+(r)ra is a triumph of the biographical form.