ABSTRACT
Historians always note the great impact of Thomas Paine's Common Sense in 1776, and critics generally agree in calling it "one of the most brilliant pamphlets ever written in the English language". Thomas Paine was born in 1737 at Thetford, a Whig stronghold in Norfolk, England. He grew up as the son of a Quaker father, a staymaker for the corset industry, and an Anglican mother, the daughter of a local attorney. Youthfulness becomes dramatic in the myriad urgencies of "now", and that basic drama, in turn, is sharpened in a redaction of the plain, the new, the common, the innocent, the fundamental, the direct, the simple, the peremptory—an aesthetic form that dominates both style and substance. A distinction must be drawn between the anger of colonial Americans in 1776 and their ability to express that anger in formal prose.
