Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine (February 9, 1737 - June 8, 1809) was an English-born American writer whose 1776 pamphlet Common Sense framed the Patriot argument for independence from Great Britain at the outset of the American Revolution, reaching an estimated 500,000 copies across the colonies, and who followed it with The American Crisis series to inspire American soldiers during the war. After returning to Britain in 1787 he wrote Rights of Man in 1791 to defend the French Revolution against conservative critics, a work that led to his trial for seditious libel in England; he fled to France in September 1792, was elected to the French National Convention despite not speaking French, and was imprisoned in Luxembourg Prison from December 1793 to November 1794. He also wrote The Age of Reason and, in 1797, Agrarian Justice, advancing Enlightenment-era arguments for human rights that shaped revolutionary discourse on both sides of the Atlantic.