Founding Daughter

What if the noble words of the Declaration of Independence were not written by Thomas Jefferson, but by an author of much lower station still aspiring to be free? What if "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" was the idea of an especially precocious, bookish, half-Black, teenaged servant girl with a boundless faith in the ideas of the Enlightenment?

In a grimy, frigid flat in post-revolutionary Paris, in the days of ruin after Napoleon, an old man named Temple Franklin lies dying in s...