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Almost everything Thomas Paine tried his hand at in his youth, including marriage, ended in abject failure. But steeped in the thinking of the Enlightenment, he went to America and in no time wrote the book that established his reputation forever more: Common Sense. After leaving for Europe with a radical design in his pocket for an iron bridge that could be mass-produced, his anti-monarchist bestseller The Rights of Man provoked such a furore that he was forced to leave England on pain of death. And in France he found himself caught up in the reign of terror and only narrowly escaped execution.