Paine [FIRST EDTION]

Hawke, David Freeman

Published by Harper & Row, New York, 1974

About this Item

Fine condition brown cloth boards with gold front cover and spine lettering contained in a fine condition non price-clipped color illustrated dust jacket. Includes List of Other Books by David Freeman Hawke; Author Dedication; List of Illustrations; Prologue; Epilogue; Acknowledgments; Notes; Bibliography and Index. Illustrated with a section of black-and-white photographic plates and a black-and-white photographic frontispiece. "Some contemporary judgments of Thomas Paine: GEORGE WASHINGTON: "Can nothing be done in our Assembly for poor Paine? Must the merits of COMMON SENSE continue to glide down the stream of time unrewarded by this country? His writings certainly have had a powerful effect upon the public mind. Ought they not, then, to meet an adequate reward?" JOHN ADAMS: "What a poor, ignorant, malicious, short-sighted, crapulous mass, is Tom Paine's Common Sense." AN ENGLISH ADMIRER: "A man of gigantic political genius, who made, while other men took baby steps, the strides of a giant." ROBESPIERRE: "Demand that Thomas Paine be decreed of accusation for the interests of America as much as of France." A FEDERALIST EDITOR'S OBITUARY: "I am unacquainted with his age, but he had lived long, done some good, and much harm." A REPUBLICAN EDITOR'S OBITUARY: "If ever a man's memory deserved a place in the breast of a freeman, it is that of the deceased, for Take 'em all in all; We ne'er shall look upon his like again!" -- from the rear outer dust jacket. "John Adams said that "without the pen of Paine the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain." Yet of all the great figures of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine has remained obscure and little understood. David Freeman Hawke remedies this situation with a distinguished biography of the brilliant propagandist who wrote Common Sense, The Age of Reason, and The Rights of Man. Hawke describes a life of incredible diversity, from Paine's obscure beginnings as a poor ladies' corset maker in England through the dramatic roles he played in the American and French revolutions, his friendships with Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe, his imprisionment in France during the Terror, his trial and banishment from England for The Rights of Man, and the pathos of his declining years. Paine was truly a man without a country; an unkempt nomad who loved to talk and to drink, he would drop in on friends for a brief visit and stay for five years. Temperamental and jealous of his reputation, he was nevertheless a gentle and totally unworldly man. In this portrait -- scholarly, affectionate, and fair -- he emerges as complex and flawed, yet one of the great revolutionary idealists." -- from the inner front and rear jacket flaps. Seller Inventory # 007235

Bibliographic Details

Title: Paine [FIRST EDTION]

Publisher: Harper & Row, New York

Publication Date: 1974

Binding: Hardcover

Illustrator: Feinberg, Sidney (book design); Jarvis, John Wesley (jacket illustration); Litwak, Luba (jacket design)

Condition: Fine

Dust Jacket Condition: Fine

Edition: 1st Edition