Read I Married a Communist for Free Online

injustice, champions of liberty for America and for all mankind. Heroic suffering. That was my specialty.
    Citizen Tom Paine
was not so much a novel plotted in the familiar manner as a sustained linking of highly charged rhetorical flourishes tracing the contradictions of an unsavory man with a smoldering intellect and the purest social ideals, a writer
and
a revolutionary. "He was the most hated—and perhaps by a few the most loved—man in all the world." "A mind that burned itself as few minds in all human history." "To feel on his own soul the whip laid on the back of millions." "His thoughts and ideas were closer to those of the average working man than Jefferson's could ever be." That was Paine as Fast portrayed him, savagely single-minded and unsociable, an epic, folkloric belligerent—unkempt, dirty, wearing a beggar's clothes, bearing a musket in the unruly streets of wartime Philadelphia, a bitter, caustic man, often drunk, frequenting brothels, hunted by assassins, and friendless. He did it all alone: "My only friend is the revolution." By the time I had finished the book, there seemed to me no way other than Paine's for a man to live and die if he was intent on demanding, in behalf of human freedom—demanding both from remote rulers and from the coarse mob—the transformation of society.
    He did it all alone.
There was nothing about Paine that could have been more appealing, however unsentimentally Fast depicted an isolation born of defiant independence and personal misery. For Paine had ended his days alone as well, old, sick, wretched, and alone, ostracized, betrayed—despised beyond everything for having written in his last testament,
The Age of Reason,
"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church." Reading about him had made me feel bold and angry and, above all, free to fight for what I believed in.
    Citizen Tom Paine
was the very book that Mr. Ringold had picked out of my bicycle basket to bring back to where we were sitting.
    "You know this one?" he asked his brother.
    Iron Rinn took my library book in Abe Lincoln's enormous hands and began flipping through the opening pages. "Nope. Never read Fast," he said. "I should. Wonderful man. Guts. He was with Wallace from day one. I catch his column whenever I see the
Worker,
but I don't have the time for novels anymore. In Iran I did, in the service read Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Caldwell..."
    "If you're going to read him, this is Fast at his best," Mr. Ringold said. "Am I right, Nathan?"
    "This book is great," I answered.
    "You ever read
Common Sense?
" Iron Rinn asked me. "Ever read Paine's writings?"
    "No," I said.
    "Read 'em," Iron Rinn told me while still leafing through my book.
    "There's a lot of Paine's writing quoted by Howard Fast," I said.
    Looking up, Iron Rinn said, "'The strength of the many is revolution, but curiously enough mankind has gone through several thousand years of slavery without realizing that fact.'"
    "That's in the book," I said.
    "I should hope so."
    "You know what the genius of Paine was?" Mr. Ringold asked me. "It was the genius of all those men. Jefferson. Madison. Know what it was?"
    "No," I said.
    "You do know what it was," he said.
    "To defy the English."
    "A lot of people did that. No. It was to articulate the cause
in
English. The revolution was totally improvised, totally disorganized. Isn't that the sense you get from this book, Nathan? Well, these guys had to find a language for their revolution. To find the words for a great purpose."
    "Paine said," I told Mr. Ringold, "'I wrote a little book because I wanted men to see what they were shooting at.'"
    "And that he did," Mr. Ringold said.
    "Here," said Iron Rinn, pointing to some lines in the book. "On George III. Listen. 'I should suffer the misery of devils, were I