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:
“The novel is a perfect medium for revealing to us the changing rainbow of our living relationships. The novel can help us to live, as nothing else can: no didactic Scripture, anyhow. If the novelist keeps his thumb out of the pan.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“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)
“Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)