In the course of his life, Thomas Paine invented a smokeless candle, received a patent for a single-span iron bridge, worked on developing steam engines, made corsets by day and wrote political pamphlets by night that would—among other things—depose a king, skewer the sacred cows of monarchy and religion, lay out the intellectual justification for two revolutions, and play a decisive role in founding a New World.

His political life began in earnest when he emigrated from England to the United States in 1774.  Paine had met Benjamin Franklin in London, and the latter had convinced him that America was an exciting, worthwhile experiment.  Paine barely survived the journey though; the ship’s water supplies were bad, and several passengers died of typhoid.  When the ship docked in Philadelphia, Franklin’s personal physician had to carry him off the boat.  Paine arrived in the country that he would change, and which would change him, as weak as a kitten.

At first, his life was quiet in America.  He became the editor of Pennsylvania Magazine and worked on his inventions.  He grew increasingly passionate about the anti-British sentiment growing around him, and in the evenings he struggled over an essay that would become Common Sense. He realized that the revolt against Britain was being lead by social elites like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin (his friends).  It was clear to Paine that the fight would not succeed unless the masses were on board.

Common Sense was written in plain language, and it described a future without a despotic monarchy.  Paine explained why America should throw off the king, and how they would benefit by doing so.  He provided a new and convincing argument for independence by advocating a complete break with history. Common Sense was oriented to the future in a way that compelled the reader to make an immediate choice: freedom and a new world, or continued oppression?

The pamphlet became an immediate, massive success.  In relation to the population of the colonies at that time, it had the largest sales and circulation of any book in American history.  (Paine was the J.K. Rowling of his time.)  Farmers stopped in their fields to read it; George Washington recited portions to inspire his troops before battle.  The pages were passed around, and read aloud in taverns.  More than any other single entity, Common Sense was responsible for spreading the idea of republicanism and encouraging recruitment for the Continental Army.  Paine’s pamphlet was, quite simply, the match that ignited the American Revolution.

America’s success thrilled Paine, as it did much of the world.  Countries that had long been stifled by cruel monarchies began to struggle for independence.  Paine wrote another pamphlet—Rights of Man—in defense of France’s brand-new revolution.  He argued that political revolution is permissible, and even desirable, whenever a government does not safeguard its people, their natural rights, and their national interests. This was a shocking proposition at the time; these kinds of words had been whispered, but not printed.  The publication of Rights of Man caused a furor in England; Paine was tried in absentia, and convicted for seditious libel against the Crown. He was conveniently unavailable for hanging because he was already in France.

He almost died in that country, too. Paine argued that the French Revolution should not betray its principles by killing the king, because it would trigger an orgy of blood-letting that would eventually drown them all. The French didn’t heed his prescient warning; they threw him in jail and sentenced him to the guillotine.  His life was saved by accident—the guard simply missed the white X on his cell door that indicated he was a condemned man.  Paine was in France, and in trouble, when he wrote his most controversial pamphlet, The Age of Reason.  In it, he argued against organized religion and in favor of deism (the belief in a god of nature—a noninterventionist creator—who permits the universe to run itself according to natural laws).  Paine criticized specific sections of the Bible; he claimed—a dangerous suggestion then and now—that religion demanded the same critical, objective inquiry as any other subject.  To be fair, Paine was not completely out of step with his times—America was a less religious country in the 1700s than it is today.  Leaders like Jefferson, Franklin and Washington were either deists or thoughtful agnostics, but still the public turned against him.  It was for this reason that George Washington refused to help Paine when he reached out from his French prison.  Paine then penned a public letter condemning the famous general, and that letter dealt a final, fatal blow to his popularity.

Paine was never wealthy and never comfortable; in fact, he rarely had a home.  He spent his life studying the world around him, looking for ways to ameliorate the human condition. His aim was no less grand than that—he wanted to change the world. What makes him extraordinary is that he succeeded. His weapon was his pen, and his writings by turn inspired, enlightened, threatened, scared and angered people.  He punched holes in commonly held beliefs; he forced people to think and ask questions. He fought for liberty and justice in America and France.  He saw a growing confusion over the role and benefit of religion, and—after giving it thought—decided that like tyranny, religion should be jettisoned entirely.

Paine was shunned at the end of his life; only six people attended his funeral.  His vision was too searing, and too demanding, for his contemporaries to acknowledge. Indeed, as Bertrand Russell (an admirer of Paine) would later write: “Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death… Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.”

To this day, Paine remains a huge influence on revolutionaries and rabble-rousers, truth-tellers and prophets. His legacy is long, and it is at our peril that we forget it. After all, Paine wrote the crucial words: “we have it in our power to begin the world again.”  This was true in Paine’s day, and they did begin again. We can only hope that these words hold true in ours.

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At the age of twenty-six, Flannery O’Connor was diagnosed with disseminated lupus, and given five years to live.

She was staying with friends in Connecticut when she fell ill.  Flannery had left the South after college with no intention of returning for more than an occasional visit.  She had attended the famous writers’ program in Iowa, and done a stint at Yaddo.  She’d worked on early drafts of the novel Wise Blood while living in New York City.  When she felt her shoulders begin to tighten during a harsh northern winter, she attributed the discomfort to arthritis.  She was a gifted writer who was building a reputation; she had her whole life ahead of her.  She brushed off her friends’ concern, but planned a trip to visit her mother.  When her uncle picked her up from the train station in Georgia, he barely recognized the pale, crumpled girl on the platform.  Flannery was, although she didn’t know it at the time, home for good.

Flannery endured steroid shots, surgeries, blood transfusions, a strict diet and a litany of medications.  Her hair fell out temporarily, her face swelled, and she had to use metal crutches to walk.  She kept her sense of humor though, and almost never complained about her situation.  Her letters from this period are bright, sarcastic, and concerned about the world beyond the borders of her family farm, Andalusia.  She developed a quiet routine that allowed her to devote her limited strength to her work.  In the morning she sat at her desk and wrote stories.  In the afternoons she rocked on her front porch and composed letters to faraway friends.  She wrote to the poet Robert Lowell, “I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.”

Flannery traveled occasionally and reluctantly, to give talks at various colleges.  She found the trips taxing, but accepted the invitations for the financial remuneration.  Otherwise, her social life was limited to Andalusia, and therefore to her mother, Regina.  The two women had a close, complicated relationship that is hilariously depicted in Flannery’s letters, collected as a volume in The Habit of Being.  Regina didn’t understand her daughter’s fiction, but she loved and respected Flannery, so she created a life on the farm that supported both her daughter’s work and her health.  Regina also permitted Flannery to populate the farm with her beloved peacocks, despite despising the noisy birds.

Flannery completed two novels and more than two-dozen stories while battling lupus.  She wrote stories that the reader experiences as a series of blows to the chest.  The stories are often upsetting, the characters ugly, and the endings dark.  The sentences are bold and sharp; her use of language is uncompromising.  A paragraph written by Flannery could be penned by no other.  Her voice is unmistakable, and inimitable.  Her stories also hold up a mirror that is important to face.  The truths she wove through her work are intended to make us uncomfortable—you will think, I am nothing like these awful characters.  But you are, and I am too.

It’s difficult for me to write about Flannery O’Connor because she’s lived in my head for the last seven years as a character in my novel, A Good Hard Look.  She exists for me as a semi-fictional character, as well as the writer of some of the best short stories ever written.  I know the facts about her, and I know the internal life I created for her.  Neither is the whole truth, and so I hesitate as I try to depict her here.  This struggle feels appropriate and familiar, however; Flannery has always demanded a lot of me.  I wrote endless drafts of my novel and in particular, hundreds of drafts of her scenes, because I wanted the book to be worthy of her.

In the end, Flannery defied the doctor’s prognosis.  She was given five years to live; she took thirteen.  She died when she was thirty-nine years old.  She is now an acknowledged master of the short story, and an icon of American literature.  Her place on this list of “well-lived lives” is hard earned.  Flannery was dealt a horrible blow with her diagnosis; many of us would have taken to our beds in her position, lost to a black hole of self-pity.  Flannery refused to do that.  She had the bravery to squeeze value out of every minute she had left.  She poured herself into her work.  She was robbed of time, energy and a future, and still she chose to reach for the moon.

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