Description
The painter who became an inventor — and changed the world twice. Samuel F. B. Morse (1791–1872) lived two full lives. First he was one of the young republic’s most ambitious painters, dreaming of becoming America’s grand historical artist. Then, in middle age, he reinvented himself — and gave the world the electromagnetic telegraph and the code that still bears his name.
Kenneth Silverman’s Lightning Man — winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Biography — is the definitive account of this strange, brilliant, tormented man. Drawing on Morse’s voluminous papers, Silverman follows him from the artist’s studio to the inventor’s workshop: ambition, obsession, and the birth of instant communication. Silverman is masterly on the tortured politics of invention — who gets credit, who gets rich, who gets forgotten.
A masterpiece of biography. For history lovers and anyone fascinated by second acts.
Samuel F. B. Morse (1791–1872) lived two lives, and both changed America. First, he was one of the young republic’s most ambitious painters — a portraitist who dreamed of becoming the nation’s grand historical artist. Then, in middle age, he reinvented himself as an inventor and gave the world the electromagnetic telegraph and the code that still bears his name.
Kenneth Silverman’s Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse (Knopf, 2003) — winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Biography — is the definitive account of this strange, brilliant, tormented man. Drawing on Morse’s own voluminous papers, Silverman follows him from the artist’s studio to the invention that “annihilated space and time”: the long struggle to build the first telegraph line, the triumphant “What hath God wrought” message of 1844, the bitter patent wars, and the fortune and fame that followed.
Yet Silverman also shows the darker Morse: the nativist politician, the conspiracist, the man haunted by what he had sacrificed. A rich, humane, and endlessly readable biography — for history lovers, it is the essential portrait of an American original.
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