Herman Melville 
Israel Potter (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) 
His 50 Years of Exile

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading.


 


Israel Potter (1855) examines the life of an ordinary patriot, a common man manipulated by powerful forces and utterly forgotten among the lists of American Revolutionary War heroes. His story is filled with the twists and turns of battle, captivity and escape, mistaken and shifting identities, and politics. On his journeys Potter meets King George III, Benjamin Franklin, John Paul Jones, and Ethan Allan.
Israel Potter is a quintessential and vital story of the everyday American hero, struggling to overcome adversity and attempting to find a place of harmony in a world of revolution, upheaval, and forgetfulness.

About the author

Herman Melville was born in August 1, 1819, in New York City, the son of a merchant. Only twelve when his father died bankrupt, young Herman tried work as a bank clerk, as a cabin-boy on a trip to Liverpool, and as an elementary schoolteacher, before shipping in January 1841 on the whaler Acushnet, bound for the Pacific. Deserting ship the following year in the Marquesas, he made his way to Tahiti and Honolulu, returning as ordinary seaman on the frigate United States to Boston, where he was discharged in October 1844. Books based on these adventures won him immediate success. By 1850 he was married, had acquired a farm near Pittsfield, Massachussetts (where he was the impetuous friend and neighbor of Nathaniel Hawthorne), and was hard at work on his masterpiece Moby-Dick.
Literary success soon faded; his complexity increasingly alienated readers. After a visit to the Holy Land in January 1857, he turned from writing prose fiction to poetry. In 1863, during the Civil War, he moved back to New York City, where from 1866-1885 he was a deputy inspector in the Custom House, and where, in 1891, he died. A draft of a final prose work, Billy Budd, Sailor, was left unfinished and uncollated, packed tidily away by his widow, where it remained until its rediscovery and publication in 1924.
Author biography courtesy of Penguin Group (USA).