Factual Basis
Israel Potter (1754–1826) was a real person born in Cranston, Rhode Island. According to his own account, a memoir titled The Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter (published 1824), he had been a veteran of the Battle of Bunker Hill, a sailor in the Revolutionary navy, a prisoner of the British, an escapee in England, a secret agent and courier in France, and a 45-year exile from his native land as a laborer, pauper, and peddler in London. Melville's plot combines a number of Potter's actual encounters—King George III, Horne Tooke, and Benjamin Franklin—with some he never had—Ethan Allen and John Paul Jones.
Read more about this topic: Israel Potter
Famous quotes containing the words factual and/or basis:
“... But all the feelings that evoke in us the joy or the misfortune of a real person are only produced in us through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist was in understanding that, in the apparatus of our emotions, since the image is the only essential element, the simplification which consists of purely and simply suppressing the factual characters is a definitive improvement.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“The basis of good manners is self-reliance. Necessity is the law of all who are not self-possessed.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)