Thomas Paine — Common Sense, Rights of Man

**Thomas Paine** was the founding generation's most dangerous writer — a man who could take complex political ideas and translate them into prose so clear, so compelling, and so accessible that ordinary people picked up muskets because of what they read. Born in 1737 in Thetford, England, the son of a corset-maker, Paine failed at nearly everything he tried before arriving in Philadelphia in 1774 at age 37 with a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin and nothing else. Within 14 months, he published "Common Sense" — a 47-page pamphlet that sold 500,000 copies in a nation of 2.5 million people, the best-selling American publication in proportion to population in history. It didn't just argue for independence; it made independence feel obvious, inevitable, and morally necessary.