Big time backfire.
I’d pass on that, thanks.
John Keats, maybe? Young, gifted, died of something that would most likely be curable today, and generally the sanest and most level-headed of the Romantic poets (not that there’s a lot of competition in that particular field :)) Or Jane Austen; she most likely had Addison’s disease, which is treatable, and she also seems like she’d be able to adapt to modern life without going completely off the rails.
Oscar Wilde, pre-imprisonment, would also be a lot of fun, and I think there’s a fairly good chance he would actually like the twenty-first century.
(Of my rejected candidates, Christopher Marlowe would probably just get himself killed again in six months or less; the Brontë sisters would merely be miserable; and we don’t have the foggiest idea what Shakespeare died of, so it may well still be incurable.)
you guys know how old he was, post revolution?
I think that he was senile at the covention, and they just gave him a pass. You might try pre-revolution Ben.
Best wishes,
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Since I’ve been learning about him for a semester, and I really do think he’d be open-minded and fascinated about the modern world and what’s happened since he was gone- Geoffry Chaucer.
Plus, we’d get the finished Canterbury Tales.
Like others, I gotta go with Jesus H. Christ. I want to test my theory that if he could see his church now, he’d never stop vomiting.
I’d bring back Hitler and Gudrun Ennslin and Ulrike Meinhof and mybe Andreas just for kicks and watch what happened. Then my mother would visit and when she found out what I was doing, she would throw me in the mental hospital, which she should have done 35 years ago.
Nah, better thought…I’ll just bring back Robert Anton Wilson. He died while I was getting on a bus. I’ve hated busses ever since.
Bill Hicks…
sniffle 
I’d bring back my father at the age he was a month before he died, then get him into a hospital post haste. Yes, it’s incredibly selfish. He died too young.
James Thurber or James Herriot, though I suspect today’s world would a bit too rough, raucous, loud and fast for either of them.
The world needs great story-tellers all the time.
Would probably have the lyrics to It’s Raining Men memorized the first day. (He was one of my first choices also- give him a chance to redeem himself- and a sitcom or talk show deal.)
Of course it would be cruelty to bring back some people. Wilde for example would learn that one of his sons was killed in WW1 and neither ever reverted to using the surname Wilde. Lincoln, Twain, so many others would learn their family lines died out a generation ago. I’d recommend bringing them back as a holograph only perhaps.
I think Benjamin Franklin would probably take the least amount of time to adapt to modern life of the founders, so perhaps him. For age- around 70 perhaps, he should already have a concept of the U.S.A., and he was a generally healthy old man save for gout and with modern healthcare could be made far healthier still.