| Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile, Volume Eight (Melville) | 
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Avg. Customer Rating:   (based on 3 reviews)
Sales Rank: 1252123
Category: Book
Author: Herman Melville
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Studio: Northwestern University Press
Manufacturer: Northwestern University Press
Label: Northwestern University Press
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Edition: Trade
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 235
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.6
ISBN: 0810115913
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.3
EAN: 9780810115910
ASIN: 0810115913
Publication Date: January 7, 1998
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
The authoritative edition of Melville?s only historical novel
Based on the life of an actual soldier who claimed to have fought at Bunker Hill, Israel Potter is unique among Herman Melville?s books: a novel in the guise of a biography. In telling the story of Israel Potter?s fall from Revolutionary War hero to peddler on the streets of London, where he obtained a livelihood by crying ?Old Chairs to Mend,? Melville alternated between invented scenes and historical episodes, granting cameos to such famous men of the era as Benjamin Franklin (Potter may have been his secret courier) and John Paul Jones, and providing a portrait of the American Revolution as the rollicking adventure and violent series of events that it really was.
This edition of Israel Potter, which reproduces the definitive text, includes selections from Potter?s autobiography, Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter, the basis for Melville?s novel.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Winds of fate January 3, 2009
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Had I not known that this was a Melville, I would have thought: a fairly competent, but not very inspired 'picaresque' novel about adventures of a Yankee farmer, soldier, sailor during times of the War of Independance.
The man gets blown about by fate.
After fighting as a sharp shooter (the famous instruction: don't shoot before you see the white in their eyes) at Bunker Hill, he gets assigned to the naval services, gets taken POW and shipped to England, escapes, gets caught, escapes, hides, meets and gets to talk to George III when working as a gardener in Kew Gardens. He gets hired as a messenger by 'friends of America', sent to Paris to meet Benjamin Franklin, who was then the Ambassador to France. He has hopes of a return to America.
He joins naval services again with an American adventurer who fights English ships in British waters (Paul Jones). When he is about to sail back to the US, he gets, by bad luck, on an English ship again. Too complicated to tell how that happens. He runs away again, hides in London, and is stuck there for another 45 years.
He has family and shifting fortunes, from moderately well to do to downright desperate. A lot of Malthusian movements as far as the economy is concerned. Wartimes bring better business and jobs, post war times bring low wages and too much competition for work and food.
After 50 years abroad he embarks for Boston again with a son.
The whole tale is based on the memoirs of a real person, embellished somewhat and serialized in a magazine.
Knowing this is a Melville, I would say: the man must have been deeply depressed by the critical and commercial failures of Moby Dick and Pierre. He promised the publishers to write nothing complicated. Alas. It is his most lackluster publication. Compared to the grandiose failure of Pierre, which at least tried something new, it is a mediocre triviality. And it didn't need to be! The subject would have permitted a real Melville novel! But the man was too dispirited to try again.
 A charming (if over-the-top) spoof of Revolutionary heroics July 25, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
The least known and most humorous of Melville's works. June 12, 1997
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
This book is at the same time the least and the most "Melvillian" of all Melville's corpus. Melville wrote in Moby-Dick that "two thirds of the world revolve in darkness." This idea certaily holds true for most of Melville's works, but not Israel Potter. In this uncharacteristically light-hearted and crisply written rewriting of American history, Melville gives an early literary version of Woody Allen's film Zelig. The character Israel Potter is that same sort of insignificant historical non-entity who just happens to get caught up in incredibly significant historical moments. In his various wanderings Israel meets and becomes politically involved with a trio of the most important American patriots--Ben Franklin, John Paul Jones, and Ethan Allen. It is through these encounters that Melville subtlely (and sometimes not so subtlely) realizes his critical agenda and those darker themes that dominate so much of his other work begin to show themselves. In his portrayal of Franklin, Melville takes a bash at what he sees as the exemplar of American "genius"--the same American genius that ignored and misunderstood his most significant works and forced him into obscurity and poverty in his lifetime. Melville sees Franklin as representative of all that is wrong with the American character--he is parsimonious, small-minded, hard-headed, and morally hypocritical. In the other two historical figures, John Paul Jones and Ethan Allen, Melville finds redemption. In them he sees represented more of that European idea of genius, the manly half-savage/half-civilized genius of Thomas Carlyle. Like Queequeg in Moby-Dick who is described as "George Washington canabalistically rendered," Jones and Allen are wildmen in a civilized society, raging against the world as they utter their outrageous and at times incomprehensible truth. A fun yet undenialbly thought-provoking read. Enjoy
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