Common Sense by Thomas Paine (Applewood Books)

Thomas Paine arrived in America from England in 1774. A friend of Benjamin Franklin, he was a writer of poetry and tracts condemning the slave trade. In 1775, as hostilities between Britain and the colonies intensified, Paine wrote Common Sense to encourage the colonies to break the British exploitative hold and fight for independence. The little booklet of 50 pages was published January 10, 1776 and sold a half-million copies.

Hardcover. Pocket-size. From Applewood Books.

About the author: Thomas Paine was born Thomas Pain in Thetford, England, on January 29, 1737, the son of a poor corset-maker. At age sixteen, Paine ran away from home and became a sailor during the Seven Years War. After the war he held several odd jobs for the British government and worked hard to supplement the little education he received as a child. While living in England in 1772, Paine wrote his first political pamphlet, The Case of the Officers of Excise. Paine came to America in 1774, was appointed editor of Pennsylvania Magazine and became active in the call for American independence from England. His revolutionary pamphlet, Common Sense, was published in 1776, sparking some of the first public calls for America to rid itself of British rule. He spent the next fifteen years of his life in England and France and wrote several more political pamphlets, including Rights of Man (1790), The Age of Reason (1794), and Agrarian Justice (1796). In 1802 Paine returned to the United States, where he died in June of 1809 in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City.