Howard Fast Critical Essay | Critical Review by George Mayberry

Critical Review by George Mayberry

SOURCE: “Journeyman of Revolution,” in The New Republic, May 10, 1943, p. 646.

In the following review, Mayberry offers positive assessment of Citizen Tom Paine, though notes the work's limitations.

To his growing portrait gallery of the American Revolution Howard Fast now adds a full-length, unvarnished picture of the man whom Theodore Roosevelt in arrogance and ignorance once called a “a filthy little atheist.” With adequate recognition of the warts upon Paine's character, Fast presents sympathetically this sometime staymaker, resident of Gin Alley, editor, soldier, inventor, politico and always pamphleteer and journeyman of revolution. Particularly good are those passages in which the disheveled and frequently drunken Englishman arouses the American colonists to transform their uprising into revolution and then sustains them by his writing and example to carry through to victory. Less successful are the episodes of Paine's last years when a bewildering succession of scenes and characters flit through...
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