Thomas Paine

Paine was born in Thetford, England, in 1737 and worked at a series of trades, including stay-making and excise collecting, before Franklin encouraged him to emigrate to America in 1774. He arrived in Philadelphia and took up journalism on the eve of the Revolution.

Common Sense, published in January 1776, argued in plain language that monarchy was absurd and that the colonies should be free and republican; it sold in enormous numbers and helped turn independence from a radical position into a popular one. During the war he wrote the American Crisis papers, whose opening line about the times that try men's souls was read to the army.

He returned to Europe and wrote Rights of Man in defense of the French Revolution, then The Age of Reason, an attack on organized religion that cost him most of his American friends. He died in New York in 1809, poor and widely reviled, though his arguments had changed the political vocabulary of both hemispheres.

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