Common Sense: And Other Writings

Thomas Paine was born in Norfolk, England, on January 29, 1737. He received a basic education in history, mathematics, and science, but left school at age 13 to apprentice in his father's corsetmaking shop. In 1757, he spent time at sea aboard the privateer ship King of Prussia, and later found employment as a journeyman staymaker in London. All the while, Paine continued to study on his own, influenced by the work of two leading figures of the Enlightenment, Isaac Newton and John Locke. He began writing political pamphlets, and at the urging of Benjamin Franklin, emigrated to Philadelphia in 1774 to work as an editor for The Pennsylvania Magazine. In 1776, he published Common Sense, which called for America's political freedom from England. The pamphlet sold more than 150,000 copies in three months. Paine next published The American Crisis during the Revolutionary War, inspiring George Washington to read it to his troops at Valley Forge. By the end of the Revolution, however, Paine's influence had run its course, and he fell out of political favor. He returned to Europe, where he published his treatise Rights of Man, which led to his arrest on charges of high treason. Disillusioned with life abroad, he returned to the U.S. to find himself vilifed as an agitator and atheist. He died in obscurity in New York City in 1809. History professor and award-winning author Gordon S. Wood was born in Concord, Massachusetts on November 27, 1933. After graduating in 1955 from Tufts University he served in the US Air Force in Japan and earned his master's degree from Harvard University. In 1964, Wood earned his Ph. D. in history from Harvard, and he taught there, as well as at the College of William and Mary and the University of Michigan, before joining the Brown University faculty in 1969. Wood has published a number of articles and books, including The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, which won the Bancroft Prize and the John H. Dunning Prize in 1970, and The Radicalism of the American Revolution, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize in 1993. He has won many other awards in the past five decades from organizations such as the American Historical Association, the New York Historical Society, and the Fraunces Tavern Museum. Wood is a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. In 2014, his book, The American Revolution: A History, was on the New York Times bestseller list.