Roland
Van Damme

The Thunder and the Silence

Benjamin Franklin built a nation. What did it cost his family?

The world knows the thunder of his genius: the inventor, the diplomat, the revolutionary. This is the story of the silence. From the dark print shops of Boston to the shadowed alleys of revolutionary Paris, Benjamin Franklin walks a solitary path. His ambition is a storm that tears through his life, splitting him from his wife, his son, and the private man he might have been. This is not the Franklin of history books. This is a man haunted by the son he lost to smallpox, torn apart by the son who chose the Crown, and stalked by the silence of the wife he left to die alone, an ocean away. For readers of Wolf Hall's political shadows and Hamnet's intimate grief, The Thunder and the Silence lays bare the man behind the myth — a man forced to choose between building a nation and saving his own family. A story of genius and its cost, of revolution and regret. What is the price of greatness, and who is left to pay it?

The Silence Dogood Weeks

Boston, 1722. A bound apprentice invents a widow so he can speak. Sixteen-year-old Benjamin Franklin is locked to his brother’s press—ink in his palms, no name on the masthead, and no right to an opinion. So he invents Silence Dogood: a middle-aged widow with a sharp quill and the freedom a boy is not allowed. Boston believes her. James Franklin, master of the New-England Courant, prints her. And every letter that sells a paper also tightens the cost of the mask. When the Courant draws the Council’s eye, the shop, the brotherhood, and the invented voice all come due. The Silence Dogood Weeks is a literary historical short about print, rivalry, and the first public lie that made a Founder. A one-hour read. Drawn from Franklin’s real 1722 Dogood letters to the New-England Courant—excerpts modernized here for today’s reader, wit and argument intact.

Flight from Boston

Boston is already behind him. A seventeen-year-old runaway has a bruise, a folded discharge, and three shillings less than he started with. Benjamin Franklin works his passage on the Speedwell, is turned away in New York, and walks toward a city that does not know his name. What he carries must last: two shirts, a folding knife, a mother's coins, and a paper that is both a door and a liability. Flight from Boston is a literary historical short about the week after the leaving—the ship, the road, three rolls on Market Street, and a laugh from a doorway. A one-hour read. Book 2 of Thunder & Silence Shorts. Stands alone.

Keith’s Empty Promise

A young printer believes a governor. In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin is seventeen, hired, and already spending a promise he has not yet been given. Governor Keith’s wax is real. The letters of credit are not in the London Hope mail bag. What remains is a city that does not owe him a shop, a merchant named Denham, and a clerk’s letter home that still has to cross the water. Keith’s Empty Promise is a literary historical short about what a powerful man’s word weighs—in the sorting, and in the city that does not owe him a shop. A one-hour read. Book 3 of Thunder & Silence Shorts. Stands alone.

Deborah Alone

A merchant's daughter is left with a handkerchief gone. In Philadelphia, Deborah Read keeps the books and the chair at its old angle, waiting on a boy who sailed with a promise of months, type, methods, home. The letters thin, then stop. A potter named Rogers is here. She marries the man who is here. The man who left comes back smaller than the promise—and she is no longer the girl on the stoop. Deborah Alone is a literary historical short about what a year of silence costs, and what a door can still hold when the girl who waited is gone. A one-hour read. Book 4 of Thunder & Silence Shorts. Stands alone.

Franky’s Winter

A printer's younger son is four, slight, and already arranging the garden. Smallpox moves north. The older boy is inoculated. The younger is not well enough. On the twenty-first of November the house changes its count. Thirty men put their names to a paper. A fire company is born in the same winter a grave is dug at Christ Church. The city goes on. The fourth place at the table stays. Franky's Winter is a literary historical short about the living child, the winter that took him, and the work that still had to be done. A one-hour read. Book 6 of Thunder & Silence Shorts. Stands alone.