Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) was an author, radical, inventor, intellectual, revolutionary, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A participant in both the American and French Revolutions and in the governments that first arose from them, Paine is best remembered as the highly popular pamphleteer whose incendiary Common Sense was largely responsible for motivating the American colonists to declare independence. His other notable contributions are Rights of Man, The Age of Reason, Agrarian Justice, and The American Crisis, a pro-revolutionary pamphlet series.