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Tom Paine's life was as heroic as his vision of a better world. Born in poverty in England, he was helped to America by Ben Franklin; he became an editor in the little provincial capital of Philadelphia. With the news of the battle fought at Lexington came the crystallization of ideas that had formed as he had watched and worked in the embryonic democracy of the new world. Paine wrote "Common Sense." It swept the colonies, adding great flames to the fire of independence. When the guns were silent, "Common Sense" left it's imprint on the shape and on the very words of the Constitution. Paine's work in America was done and "where freedom was not there was his home." In England and then in France he fought for the Rights of Man. He became a member of the French Convention. He was imprisoned for months in the Luxembourg Prison. At last he came back to America, nearly forgotten, despised and poor, but he found the nation to which he had given his strength and devotion a triumphant and free Republic. from the jacket of the 1945 World edition