The name of Thomas Paine is far better known than the life of the man behind it. Yet Paine’s origins had everything to do with the democratic causes that inspired his unmatched brilliance as a popular communicator. Son of a Quaker corset maker, he hailed from Norfolk, a county swept up in the radically egalitarian Leveller movement that arose during the English Civil War less than a century before his birth, in 1737. Paine failed in brief careers as a corset maker, excise officer, schoolteacher, and tobacconist before concluding that the only possible life for him was one of writing and reflecting. He came to America on the eve of the Revolution, with a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin, whom he had met in London, and began what would quickly become a dazzling career as a pamphleteer, newspaper writer, and propagandist of genius: Common Sense (1776) made him perhaps the greatest “influencer” in our nation’s history.
