Start Here
The Conway Edition runs to four volumes. If you've never read Paine, here are five pieces in the order I'd recommend -- a weekend's reading that takes you from the founding to the philosophy.
- 1
Read the pamphlet that started a country.
January 1776. Forty-eight pages, sold for two shillings, and within three months 100,000 copies were in print in a colony of 2.5 million. It is the most widely read political pamphlet in American history; the argument the Continental Congress declared six months later. Begin here, before any biography, and let the voice land first.
- 2
Hear the sentence that saved the army.
"These are the times that try men's souls." Written at a drumhead in Newark in December 1776, after Washington's army had been driven across New Jersey, and read aloud to the troops three days before the crossing into Trenton. Twelve more Crisis papers followed across the war; this is the one everyone has quoted and almost no one has read in full.
- 3
Watch him answer Burke.
Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France had blamed the upheaval on dangerous abstractions. Paine answered, paragraph by paragraph, with the proposition that rights are not gifts of any government and cannot be revoked by one. The book was a sensation in London, indictable in England, and is the foundational text of modern democratic argument.
- 4
Read what got him cancelled.
Written in Paris in 1793-94, the first draft completed hours before he was arrested and locked in the Luxembourg Prison. A clear, plain-language case for deism and against revealed religion -- the book that earned him Theodore Roosevelt's epithet a century later and made his name unspeakable in polite American company for generations. Read the first half-dozen sections at minimum.
- 5
Finish with the proposal nobody else made.
Paine's last major pamphlet, 1797. A national fund, paid from inheritance tax on landed estates, distributing a lump sum to every citizen at twenty-one and a pension at fifty. The first serious proposal for a universal basic income and old-age pension, two centuries before the policy had a name. Short, lucid, and still ahead of its time.
Once you've finished these five, the canon opens up. Try a themed reading plan, follow him through the timeline, or pick a volume you're curious about and follow the threads.