The genius of America's most prolific inventor, Thomas Edison, is widely acknowledged, and Edison himself has become an almost mythic figure. But how much do we really know about the man who considered deriving rubber from a goldenrod plant as opposed to the genius who gave us electric light? Neil Baldwin gives us a complex portrait of the inventor himself—both myth and man—and a multifaceted account of the intellectual climate of the country he worked in and irrevocably changed.

Neil Baldwin is an executive director of the National Book Foundation and coeditor of The Writing Life. He is the author of critically acclaimed biographies of William Carlos Williams and Man Ray, as well as Legends of the Plumed Serpent: Biography of a Mexican God.

— Roger Rosenblatt

— Newsweek

— Wall Street Journal