Israel Potter Pdf Summary Reviews By Herman Melville

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Israel Potter Pdf Summary

Herman Melville’s “Israel Potter” is the Fictionalised tale of a man who really did fight in the American Revolution — a man who lived a life of very real adventure. After fighting in the revolution, he went on to be a part of the newly-established United States Navy, ended up serving as a secret courier for Benjamin Franklin Bits of this are fiction, and may be even more spectacular.

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Israel Potter Review

John Potter

4.0 out of 5 stars MOVE OVER, HARRY – IT’S ISRAEL!
Reviewed in the United States on January 11, 2018

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The writer of this review is a second cousin about seven times removed from the historical Israel Potter, so don’t expect me to be too impartial, ‘cause I won’t.
Melville had written this little potboiler hoping to redeem both his reputation and pocket book after the failure of MOBY DICK. He based his material on the chapbook written by Israel, with all its inaccuracies and tall tales, and did not bother to do research into his subject (not that there was much available for him to research). But his masterly gifts enabled him to give us a long-lost mini-masterpiece.
Melville wrote this as a humorous piece, and there are a few humorous bits in it. but comedy was never really his forte. He concentrated on Israel’s early years, when Israel fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill, was taken as a prisoner of war to England, led an attempted mutiny on board the prison ship, escaped, met both Ben Franklin and John Paul Jones in Paris, went with Jones on a rip-roaring sailing spree around the North Atlantic (actually Israel never even met Jones anywhere) and finally settled in London to work at various odd jobs. Still, there must have been something in Israel’s book to attract Melville’s attention enough to expand it into a full novel.
The great author took the opportunity to use the Potter/Trumbull opus to poke a little fun at some of the founders and fighters of the Revolution. But then Melville simply passed over the last forty years of Israel’s life in London, which were spent in bitter poverty and struggle, largely perhaps because they would not serve Melville’s comic attempts.
Still, it was a good try. And more recently contemporary writer David Chacko has taken this material to produce his own works – four books worth! Israel Potter’s life is the stuff that legends are built on. It was “One of the strangest lives ever made known.” The last chapter of Melville’s is a moving account of how Israel in his last years finally returned to his native land, a forgotten veteran of the Revolution, and sought out his old childhood home. “He died the same day that the oldest oak in his native hills was blown down.”

D. Cloyce Smith

3.0 out of 5 stars A charming (if over-the-top) spoof of Revolutionary heroics
Reviewed in the United States on July 24, 2006

After the financial failure of “Moby-Dick” and the social scandal of “Pierre,” Melville settled down to write a book that would please the public, his publisher, and (most important at this point in his life) his bank account. He promised George Putnam (his publisher) both “nothing of any sort to shock the fastidious” and “nothing weighty.” In short, he wrote an adventure story.

But not just any adventure story. Melville drew on a little-known autobiography published 30 years earlier and called the “Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter,” which recounted the extraordinary career of a veteran of the Battle of Bunker Hill who delivered secret wartime letters to Benjamin Franklin, who found himself stranded in Europe, and who ended up a pauper in London. (The original Northwestern-Newberry edition reprints a facsimile copy of this source, keyed to passages in Melville’s text. More remarkably, this edition notes the recent discovery of an unrelated text by a British author who included a brief account of Potter’s days as a nomadic street-trader in London, along with a portrait of the man himself.)

Yet Melville’s book is not merely a biographical novel. Instead, he greatly embellishes Potter’s account, incorporating a farcical portrait of Franklin and adding equally comic accounts of John Paul Jones, King George, Ethan Allen, and several other historical figures whom Potter never actually met. In Melville’s hands, Franklin becomes a miserly, philandering “tanned Machiavelli in tents” and “not less a lady’s man, than a man’s man, a wise man, and an old man”; Allen is transformed into a larger-than-life Paul Bunyan figure; King George is a kindly dolt; and Jones turns into a tattooed, flirtatious, vainglorious rake. And poor Israel Potter himself is alternately drafted, imprisoned, released, and press-ganged.

The result is not only Melville’s most accessible work but also an over-the-top spoof of the heroic amateurs running the Revolution and (more subtly) an acidic indictment of the abandonment of the early American dream. While it lacks the depth or the “weight” of his other late works, “Israel Potter” makes up for its shortcomings with charm and mirth.

About Herman Melville Author Of Israel Potter pdf Book

Herman Melville author of moby-dick pdf — Herman Melville

Celebrated American author Herman Melville wrote ‘Israel Potter’ pdf book and several other sea-adventure novels before turning to poetry later in his literary career. Herman Melville was born in New York City in 1819. He worked as a crew member on several vessels beginning in 1839, his experiences spawning his successful early novels Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847). Subsequent books, including his masterpiece Moby-Dick pdf(1851), sold poorly, and by the 1860s Melville had turned to poetry. Following his death in New York City in 1891, he posthumously came to be regarded as one of the great American writers. Melville was born in New York City on August 1, 1819, to Allan and Maria Gansevoort Melvill (Maria added the “e” to the family name following her husband’s death). In the mid-1820s, young Melville fell ill to scarlet fever, and though he regained his health not long afterward, his vision was left permanently impaired by the illness.