Volume 22, Number 8 · May 15, 1975
Founding Father Tom
By Eric Foner
Paine
by David Hawke
Harper and Row, 418 pp., $15.00
Thomas Paine: His Life, Work, and Times
by Audrey Williamson
St. Martin's Press, 296 pp., $12.50
Of the men who made the American Revolution, none had a more remarkable career, or a more peculiar fate, than Thomas Paine. While his friends George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and his ideological antagonist John Adams, came from middle- and upper-class families long established on American soil, Paine's origins lay in the English lower classes. He did not even arrive in America until the very eve of the Revolution and then became this country's first professional pamphleteer; his contribution to the revolutionary cause lay in spreading ideas among the population rather than in making day-to-day decisions.
Review, 3538 words
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