Thomas Paine Filthy Little Atheist

The pamphleteer who set fire to two revolutions.

Thomas Paine was the corset-maker’s son who walked off a Norfolk excise round, sailed to Philadelphia at thirty-seven, and within fourteen months wrote the pamphlet that argued thirteen colonies into a country.

For the next thirty years he kept doing it. Common Sense in Philadelphia, the American Crisis papers from a drumhead at Newark, the Rights of Man in London, the Age of Reason in a Luxembourg prison cell. He was loved on three continents, jailed on one, and dug up after death by an English radical who lost the bones on the way home.

His writings, collected at the end of the nineteenth century in Moncure Conway’s four-volume Writings of Thomas Paine, remain among the most consequential prose in the English language.