Novelist
In 1736/37 he published, anonymously, a novel describing a utopian society established by shipwrecked religious dissidents (the Inqviraner) near an unnamed North-African mountain range, in which complete religious freedom existed. The novel drew from his own experiences of his time in Constantinople and on French and British novels, like Montesquieu's Lettres persanes and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.
At the urging of Jesuits, presumably for his liberal opinions on religion, he was imprisoned and killed (by strangulation) in Nieswiez in Poland-Lithuania (now Belarus) in 1742.
Read more about this topic: Johann Bachstrom
Famous quotes containing the word novelist:
“Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn’t know he was a novelist either.”
—John Irving (b. 1942)
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“The novelist ... must live in paranoia and seek to be one with the world; he must be terrified of experience and hungry for it; he must think himself nothing and believe he is superior to all.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)