The Pamphleteers

1737–1809 · England & America

A failed corset-maker and twice-dismissed excise officer who arrived in Philadelphia at 37 with little but a letter from Franklin — and within two years wrote Common Sense, the pamphlet that talked a continent into independence. The American Crisis steadied Washington’s freezing army; Rights of Man defended revolution; The Age of Reason cost him nearly every friend he had. He never took a royalty from Common Sense.

1694–1778 · France

François-Marie Arouet, who took the name Voltaire, was the most famous writer in Europe for most of his eighty-three years — poet, playwright, historian, satirist, and the author of some twenty thousand letters. Imprisoned in the Bastille at twenty-three for verses mocking the regent and exiled to England at thirty-one, he returned with a conviction that outlived him: that cruelty thrives on unexamined authority, and that ridicule is a weapon against it. In old age he became something new — a private citizen who took up the cause of men destroyed by the courts, and won.

1818–1895 · United States

Born enslaved in Maryland, Douglass taught himself to read, escaped to freedom, and became the most influential Black abolitionist of the nineteenth century — a spellbinding orator, newspaper publisher, and author whose autobiographies galvanized the anti-slavery cause and defined American self-liberation.

1706–1790 · United States

Printer, inventor, diplomat, and founding father — a self-made polymath who systematized self-improvement with his thirteen virtues and founded a mutual-improvement club, the Junto, that prefigured the mastermind group.

1759–1797 · England

English writer and philosopher whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is a founding text of feminist thought. She argued that women appear inferior only because they are denied education, and lived an independent, self-supporting intellectual life well ahead of her era.