Mary Wollstonecraft

Thomas Paine – June 8, 1809 was an English-American author, pamphleteer, radical, inventor, intellectual, revolutionary, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He has been called "a corsetmaker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination." Born in... Thetford, England, in the county of Norfolk, Paine immigrated to the British American colonies in 1774 in time to participate in the American Revolution. His principal contributions were the powerful, widely read pamphlet Common Sense , the all-time best-selling American book that advocated colonial America's independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain, and The American Crisis , a pro-revolutionary pamphlet series. Common Sense was so influential that John Adams said, "Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.” Paine lived in France for most of the 1790s, becoming deeply involved in the French Revolution. He wrote the Rights of Man , in part a defense of the French Revolution against its critics.
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William Godwin was an English journalist, political philosopher and novelist. He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism, and the... first modern proponent of anarchism. Godwin is most famous for two books that he published within the space of a year: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, an attack on political institutions, and Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, which attacks aristocratic privilege, but also is the first mystery novel. Based on the success of both, Godwin featured prominently in the radical circles of London in the 1790s. In the ensuing conservative reaction to British radicalism, Godwin was attacked, in part because of his marriage to the pioneering feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797 and his candid biography of her after her death; their daughter, Mary Godwin would go on to write Frankenstein and marry the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Godwin wrote prolifically in the genres of novels, history and demography throughout his lifetime.
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