- Charlie Munger The Pulitzer-winning 1938 biography of Franklin, Munger's lifelong hero and the model for the 'Poor Charlie' framing of the Almanack. Munger recommended it by name at the 1994 meeting — 'we've never had anybody quite like Franklin ... Never again.' (He misremembered it on stage as a 1950s paperback; the original is 1938, and it won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.) source ↗
The Pulitzer Prize-winning 1938 biography of America's original polymath — printer, scientist, inventor, diplomat, and founder — by the critic and scholar Carl Van Doren. Munger considered it the definitive Franklin biography.
Munger recommended this biography by name at the 1994 Berkshire annual meeting: 'we've never had anybody quite like Franklin… Never again.' Van Doren captures the multi-disciplinary range that is the model for Munger's latticework: Franklin accumulated knowledge across electricity, printing, diplomacy, and public works without diluting his effectiveness in any one domain. For founders, Franklin demonstrates that breadth does not trade off against depth — it creates combinatorial advantage. Franklin also practiced inversion centuries before Jacobi, writing his virtues as a daily checklist and composing his famous 'Advice on the Choice of a Mistress' as a pure inversion argument.