NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A revelatory biography of Thomas Alva Edison from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edmund Morris, the most prolific genius in American history.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time • Publishers Weekly • Kirkus Reviews

Thomas Edison was the most famous American of his era, and he's still a household name today, but he's mostly remembered for one thing: the incandescent lamp. That invention, 140 years ago, so dazzled the world that it overshadowed everything else he built. In total, this near-deaf genius ("I haven't heard a bird sing since I was twelve years old") patented 1,093 inventions, and left others, including the X-ray fluoroscope, unlicensed for medicine's benefit.

This is the first major Edison biography in over twenty years, and its achievement is showing the Edison history forgot: the philosopher, futurist, chemist, botanist, wartime defense adviser, and founder of nearly 250 companies, alongside the myth everyone already knows. Edmund Morris, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, brings the same interpretive sharpness and literary polish that shaped his biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Ludwig van Beethoven. As a trained musician, he's especially suited to tracing Edison's fifty-year fixation on recording technology and his early work syncing sound to film. He also sets aside the conspiracy theories about Edison and Nikola Tesla, laying out evidence of a relationship that was wary but genuinely respectful on both sides.

Drawing on seven years spent in the five million pages of original documents held at Edison's West Orange laboratory, plus rare access to family papers, Morris brings his subject fully to life: an adored but autocratic husband to two wives, and a father of six who was often absent. What emerges isn't a sentimental hero but a force of nature driven by relentless invention, and it's the portrait Edison has been waiting for.

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