Collected Writings.

A WRITER'S "concerns are with all mankind," wrote Thomas Paine in 1777, "and though he cannot command their obedience, he can assign them their duty." "Poor Paine [is] not the most prudent man in the world," wrote an American a few years later. These books support both judgments.

John Keane's biography is hard going, thanks to its clumsy and cacophonous prose. To take one instance out of hundreds, Keane writes, of the style of Rights of Man, that "its author presented himself as a burping, farting rebel" -- and he means it as a compliment.

Happily, Paine's life is writer-proof. He was born in England in 1737. As a young man, he worked as a privateer, a Methodist preacher, a corset maker, and a tax collector. In 1774, he sailed for America, with a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin, which got him a job on a Philadelphia newspaper; barely a year after arriving, he published Common Sense. It "burst . . . like Jove in Thunder," one patriot said. The 13 colonies had been in armed rebellion for half a year, but had not yet declared their independence. Paine showed them where they were going, and why they should go there. He accompanied Washington on the bitter retreat across New Jersey at the end of 1776, and a week before the battle of Trenton he published the first installment of The American Crisis.

These are the times that try men's souls: the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it NOW, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. Tis dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to set a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.

This was the republican equivalent of King Harry's speech on the Feast of St. Crispian, and it is greater because it was not a play.

After the war, Paine tried to build an iron bridge across the Schuylkill River. When there were no takers, he brought his design to France, in time for the fall of the Bastille. "A share in two revolutions," he wrote, "is living to some purpose." When Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France appeared, Paine altered Rights of Man, which he had already begun, to respond to it. He made some clever hits at Burke's rhetoric -- "he pities the plumage," he wrote of Burke's aria on the age of chivalry, "but forgets the dying bird." He did less well as a prophet: "Whom has the National Assembly brought to the scaffold? None."

Paine was elected to the National Assembly himself. After he had argued for sparing the life of Louis XVI, Danton told him that "revolutions cannot be made with rosewater." Paine almost lost his life twice: once to a mob, once to the guillotine -- the wardens of the prison into which the Jacobins had thrown him overlooked his cell by accident. After Thermidor, he worked with Bonaparte on plans to invade England. But he fell out with the dictator, and returned to America in 1802.

President Jefferson treated him with respect, though not quite as much respect as Paine would have liked. But America and its advocate had changed during their years apart. The Age of Reason, an anti-Christian tract he had begun in prison, enraged his enemies and dismayed his friends. He moped and drank and lived almost undisturbed except for evangelists trying vainly to convert him. God "would not send such a foolish ugly old woman as you," he told one. He died in Greenwich Village in 1809.

The defining fact about Paine is that he was a journalist, one of the first great ones. Everyone in the business has known one like him: brilliant, stimulating, slovenly, feckless, conceited. He gave his hits away -- he spent the profits of Common Sense buying mittens for the American Army -- then scrambled for appointments and pensions. He quarreled with publishers, which many writers do, and with John Adams, which everyone did, but he also quarreled with almost everybody else.

His two theoretical works try to prove too much. In Rights of Man, he has no trouble showing, on his principles, that the first French constitution was superior to the British constitution. But his principles could not defend the French constitution from critics to its left. The Age of Reason has the humor of fundamentalism standing on its head: "one part of God is represented by a dying man, and another part . . . by a flying pigeon . . ." After such skepticism, Paine's paeans to deism sound sentimental. Creation, "the bible of the deist," shows at least as many caprices and barbarities as the one the Gideons distribute.

Though he grew up in England and held office in France, Paine was at his best and most at home during his first stay in America. Here he showed a strategic grasp of war and politics. Several of his policy recommendations -- federalism, hard money -- were sober. Paine peaked early -- the greatest of his American works were written in his late thirties, when he had almost half of his life still ahead of him. The shape we see in our lives may be quite different from the shape others see, if they notice us at all. But if he had never peaked, it is possible that the United States might have been stillborn. May we always honor him.