To the ever-increasing number of books that deal with the events and the personages of our own brief American past, Howard Fast has made an interesting and valuable addition with his fictionalized biography of Thomas Paine. In Citizen Tom Paine he has succeeded, to a laudable degree, not only in sketching a vivid portrait of one of the most extraordinary figures of the eighteenth century, but in projecting it against the stormy background of the times in which he lived and played a part, whose importance has been far too little recognized. (p. 1)

[Mr. Fast] tells his story by means of a series of quick and vivid impressions, with frequent changes of locale and sudden flash-backs to Paine's early life—in short, a kind of montage. And though one might take exception, now and then, to a certain lushness in the writing, there emerges from the book, as...