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Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (Penguin Classics) | 
 enlarge | Author: Herman Melville
Creator: Robert Levine
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 691015
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5 x 0.7
ISBN: 014310523X
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.3
EAN: 9780143105237
ASIN: 014310523X
Publication Date: March 25, 2008
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| Also Available In:
| • | Kindle Edition - Israel Potter, His Fifty Years of Exile | | • | Library Binding - Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile | | • | Paperback - Israel Potter | | • | Hardcover - Israel Potter: His Fifty Year of Exile, Volume Eight, Scholarly Edition (Melville) | | • | Paperback - Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile, Volume Eight, Scholarly Edition (Melville) | | • | Paperback - Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile, Volume Eight (Melville) | | • | Unknown Binding - Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (The Writings of Herman Melville) | | • | Hardcover - Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile | | • | Paperback - Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile | | • | Paperback - Israel Potter | | • | Hardcover - Israel Potter | | • | Paperback - Israel Potter | | • | Paperback - Israel Potter | | • | Paperback - Israel Potter (Large Print Edition) | | • | Hardcover - Israel Potter | | • | Paperback - Israel Potter | | • | Paperback - Israel Potter | | • | Hardcover - Israel Potter | | • | Paperback - Israel Potter | | • | Paperback - Israel Potter | | • | Unknown Binding - Israel Potter: His fifty years of exile | | • | Unknown Binding - Israel Potter,: His fifty years of exile (The rediscovery series) | | • | Unknown Binding - Israel Potter: His fifty years of exile (Dolphin books) | | • | Unknown Binding - Israel Potter: His fifty years of exile (The Works of Herman Melville, standard edition) | | • | Unknown Binding - Israel Potter,: His fifty years of exile, | | • | Unknown Binding - The works of Herman Melville. Standard ed. vol. XI | | • | Kindle Edition - Israel Potter |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
The authoritative edition of Melvilles 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 Melvilles books: a novel in the guise of a biography. In telling the story of Israel Potters 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 Potters autobiography, Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter, the basis for Melvilles novel.
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| Customer Reviews:
 A charming (if over-the-top) spoof of Revolutionary heroics July 25, 2006
4 out of 4 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
8 out of 9 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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