Thomas Paine

Thomas "Tom" Paine was an author, pamphleteer, radical, inventor, intellectual, revolutionary, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He has been called "a corsetmaker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination." Born in Thetford, in the English county of Norfolk, Paine emigrated to the British American colonies in 1774 in time to participate in the American Revolution. His principal contributions were the powerful, widely read pamphlet Common Sense (1776), the all-time best-selling American book that advocated colonial America's independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain, and The American Crisis (1776-1783), a pro-revolutionary pamphlet series. His writing of "Common Sense" was so influential that John Adams reportedly said, "Without the pen of the author of 'Common Sense,' the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain".