Historical Deviations
The story is a fictionalized representation of the historical events that happened, although the setting can be considered quite accurate. The character names are mixed up in the novel, for example, the main protagonist William Pierce is changed to Edward Pierce, and Edward Agar to Robert Agar. Crichton admitted he did not want to be constrained by what actually happened. The true story of the robbery can be found in the book by David C. Hanrahan: The First Great Train Robbery (Robert Hale, 2011).
Read more about this topic: The Great Train Robbery (novel)
Famous quotes containing the word historical:
“This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the English standard, nor did the English by the Roman, nor the Roman by the Greek.... From this September afternoon, and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more remote than the dark ages.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)