Thomas Paine

    The daring, dauntless, and ever disputatious Thomas Paine was born on January 29, 1737 in Thetford, England. His Quaker father made corsets and at thirteen, Paine left grammar school to join his father in apprenticeship. Paine opened his own corset shop Sandwich, England. Paine eventually became a customs official. Collecting taxes gave him a piercing look into how the burden of taxation affected people. He was soon dismissed as a tax collector and his shop failed, making him especially eager to emigrate to America and start a new life.
     He arrived Philadelphia on November 30, 1774. Robert Aitken of the Pennsylvania Magazine hired Paine as editor of the publication. Paine did not just limit himself to his role as editor. He also wrote various poems, essays, and political pieces for the magazine using a myriad of pseudonyms.
    Among his works is the famed Common Sense, published in 1776, in which he argued that the British system was not the most perfect government in the world and sought to "rescue man from tyranny and false systems and false principles of government, and enable him to be free." Paine's ability to write in a clear, direct manner made Common Sense, and all of his subsequent pamphlets, accessible to a broader audience. Paine enlisted in the army upon the Declaration of Independence and during his time in the militia, he wrote The Crisis, a series of pamphlets whose purpose was to rally the public's support of the war effort. Paine later found himself in Europe amid the French Revolution where he composed yet another work: The Rights of Man. In The Rights of Man, Paine argued that the American and French Revolutions would lead to a world revolution that would overthrow all monarchies and aristocracies. This work faced staunch criticism and began the dwindling of his once scintillating flame of popularity. He still continued to write, though, publishing The Age of Reason, which he began writing while imprisoned in France. But by the time he published his Letter to George Washington, in which he criticized President Washington for his conservatism, it was too late. What little was left of Paine's popularity in America had now perished.
     Paine died a lonely man with soiled image on June 8, 1809. The New York Citizen so aptly encompassed American's opinions of him in a mere sentence from Paine's obituary: "He had lived long, did some good and much harm." He may have died with a tainted image, but his legacy is now held in high regard for he did, indeed, play a significant in the American Revolution. Never did he cease to challenge all forms of tyranny in defense of liberty and freedom from oppression.  Not only that, but he created a new type of political rhetoric that appealed to the masses, a then unprecedented undertaking.

Source:  
-American Journalists by Donald A. Ritchie
-http://www.biography.com/people/thomas-paine-9431951?page=3