Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was an author, radical, inventor, intellectual, revolutionary, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He is best remembered as the highly popular pamphleteer whose incendiary Common Sense was largely responsible for motivating the American colonists to declare independence.
Written in the early months of 1776, Paine's forceful and cogent pamphlet brought the notion of American Independence into the mainstream.