Reveiw Of Edison: A Biography

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Jazarrion Ellsworth Mr. Terry Denson AP U.S. History February 16, 2012 Edison: A Biography Unraveled Bibliography: Josephson, Matthew. Edison. New York, McGraw-Hill; 1959. The Name of the book I am reviewing is called Edison: A Biography and was written by Mathew Josephson. This book is basically what the title suggests; it gives a vivid walk through of the life of Thomas Alva Edison in rich detail. The author does a superb job of organizing the story chronologically with a good balance of his personal life and his public life. This biography is brilliant from a stance that it is full of excessive facts about the outside factors of the things that made him just an “inventor” which made him seem more dynamic. The author, Mathew Josephson, was born in Brooklyn, New York, where he graduated from Columbia University. Josephson was initially a poet and journalist/editor for many papers, post, and magazines. His poems where published in a collection called Galimathias in 1923 which that was his first public work. 5 years later his second published work and first biography titled Zola and His Time was released. Josephson had been the associate editor of Broom from 1922-24, contributing editor of Transition from 1928-29. He also regularly contributed to The New Republic, The Nation, The New Yorker, and the Saturday Evening Post. He has about 16 well known literary works, but the most famous of them are: The Politicos (1938, essay), Victor Hugo (1942, biography), Stendhal (1946, biography), and Edison (1959, biography). Most of his collective papers reside at the library at Yale University. In this biography, Edison, Josephson covers the time period of 1847 through 1931, covering every aspect of Thomas Edison’s life. This time period covers eras, ages, war periods and movements respectively such as “Exploration and Expansion”, “Civil War”, “Reconstruction,
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