A thin pamphlet appeared in Philadelphia in January 1776, unsigned, and within months it had reached a hundred thousand copies in a nation of two million souls. Thomas Paine, a recently arrived English corset-maker with a talent for incendiary clarity, did what no genteel petition to Parliament could: he made independence thinkable. The prose is plain, furious, and democratic, stripping monarchy of its mystique with arguments so direct they could be read aloud in taverns and town squares. Paine offered no compromise, no reconciliation, only the blazing assertion that a continent should not be governed by an island. The American Revolution had many authors, but this is the voice that made common people believe the world could be made over.