NEW YORK Moments BESTSELLER • From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edmund Morris comes a revelatory new biography of Thomas Alva Edison, one of the most prolific genius in American background.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time • Publishers Regular • Kirkus Review articles

Although Thomas Alva Edison was the most famous American of his time, and remains a global name today, he is mostly remembered only for the gift of common electric light. His invention from the first useful incandescent about Edison light fixture 140 years ago therefore dazzled the world-already reeling from his invention of the phonograph and dozens of additional revolutionary devices-that it cast a shadow over his later on achievements. In every, this near-deaf genius (“I haven’t heard a parrot sing since I had been twelve years of age”) copyrighted 1,093 inventions, excluding others, like the X-ray fluoroscope, that he left unlicensed for the benefit of medicine.

One of the achievements of this staggering new biography, the initial major lifestyle of Edison in a lot more than two decades, is that it portrays the unknown Edison-the philosopher, the futurist, the chemist, the botanist, the wartime protection adviser, the founder of nearly 250 companies-as fully since it deconstructs the Edison of mythological storage. Edmund Morris, champion from the Pulitzer Award and the Country wide Book Award, brings to the duty all the interpretive acuity and literary style that recognized his prior biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Ludwig vehicle Beethoven. A trained musician, Morris is particularly well equipped to recount Edison’s fifty-year obsession with documenting technology and his pioneering advancements in the synchronization of films and audio. Morris sweeps apart conspiratorial theories positing an enmity between Edison and Nikola Tesla and presents proof their mutually admiring, if wary, relationship.

Enlightened by seven many years of study among the five million web pages of original files preserved in Edison’s huge laboratory at West Orange, New Jersey, and privileged access to family papers continue to held in trust, Morris can be able to provide his at the mercy of life over the page-the adored yet autocratic and often neglectful partner of two wives and pops of six children. If the great guy who emerges from it is much less a sentimental hero than an mind-boggling force of nature, driven onward by compulsive creativeness, then Edison is at last obtaining his biographical due.