He held a book in his hands, and my eyes fell on the title: Tell Freedom by Peter Abrahams. I was transfixed. The words seemed to speak of a world beyond the walls of the Alliance.

(Waldinger & Schulz, “The Good Life”, p.99)

(Waldinger & Schulz, “The Good Life”, p.107)

As a prism of history, biography attracts and holds the reader’s interest in the larger subject. People are interested in other people, in the fortunes of the individual …. [Biography] encompasses the universal in the particular.”

(Barbara Tuchman)

As Carl Van Doren wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Franklin, “He had wanted wealth only that he might be free, and to be free only that he might be useful.