Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine was an English-born political activist and pamphleteer who emigrated to America in 1774 and became one of the founding voices of the Revolution. Common Sense (1776) argued for independence in language ordinary people could read. The American Crisis sustained morale during the darkest years of the war. He later moved to France, survived the Terror by weeks, and published The Age of Reason, a deist attack on organised religion that made him notorious on both sides of the Atlantic. He died poor and largely forgotten in New York.