“reminiscences of Anna Leonowens herself. A widow with two children, she had served as governess or tutor to the sixty-four children of King Rama IV or King Mongkut.”
Of course, *Anna and the King of Siam *which in turn became The King and I overshadow the real Anna and the real King.
I’d also include Henry Higins of Pygmalion then My Fair Lady based on linguist Henry Sweet.
the wiki: "In the preface to his play Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw, after describing Sweet, stated that “[Henry] Higgins is not a portrait of Sweet, to whom the adventure of Eliza Doolittle would have been impossible; still, as will be seen, there are touches of Sweet in the play.”
There are scholars such as James McPherson who feel that Custer, along with Wesley Merritt and Phil Sheridan, played a key role during the Civil War in transforming the Union cavalry from hapless into a first rate outfit. Sheridan bought the table used at Appomattox and gave it to Custer's wife Libby. Libby spent the 55 years of widowhood using her PR skills to promote her husband favorably. There was an inevitable backlash and things probably went too far the other way.
I would include Napoleon (at least outside of France, not sure within), Genghis and Kublai Khan, Saladin, Asoka, Alexander and Osman (who captured Constantinople) based on various ‘historical’ treatments that added far more fiction than fact.
I suppose that the fictionalized versions have not surpassed the originals in actual historical importance, but definitely in pop culture.
Please explain why it is a tangent. And I’m asking seriously, again, regardless of whatever motives Twickster wishes to impute to me. Surely the question of whether a figure actually qualifies as someone whose historical version has been surpassed by their fictionalised version is central to the thread topic? Everybody has been perfectly civil in the discussion apart from the post by njtt and my post in response. You can tell us to knock that kind of behaviour off, fair enough, but why block that discussion? It’s interesting, germane, and has shown every indication that it can be conducted civilly. I’m genuinely puzzled.
Indiana Jones, who was likely based on H. Ryder Haggard’s Allan Quatermain, who in turn may have been based in part on the historical British explorer Percy Fawcett, even though Quatermain’s initial appearance precedes Fawcett by quite a few years. The Jones character may have been based directly on Percy Fawcett, but his adventures certainly mirror the Quatermain character.
I’m very surprised by many of the names proposed, which are of famous historical figures that people are likely to have heard about primarily at school, in documentaries, magazines, etc… rather than in fiction. For instance :
Mark Antony, Eleanor of Aquitaine, the Buddha, Rasputin, Nero, Joan of Arc, Eva Peron, Cleopatra, Alexander, Kublai Khan…
Even more so when the assumption is made that people would know about them from a specific work of fiction : a theater play, a German novel, a musical, a Hollywood movie from the 60s, a comic strip… since while the real characters are generally well-known, only a tiny fraction of the population will have seen/read these works.
I would have expected overall less historically important people who have been depicted in many works of fiction (like Jesse James or Custer) or people who would be completely unknown to the general public if it wasn’t for a specific fiction (Eliott Ness or Will Adams).
I would certainly disagree about Brutus. Has Shakespeare never written Julius Caesar, the very real assassination of Caesar by Brutus and co. had massive historical implications.
The point isn’t whether we would know them only from a specific work of fiction, but how much works of fiction have colored what we know-- or think we know about them. Also, in most cases, there are many, many works about these people, but the OP of the name may have given just one as an example; that doesn’t mean the poster was suggesting that everything we know about the person comes from that one work.
Also, answers are going to differ among countries. I’m sure that in the UK, children learn about Eleanor of Aquitaine in school. Americans don’t. However, Katharine Hepburn is still very popular, and people who weren’t even alive when she made most of her films will still look for her, so a lot of Americans have seen The Lion in Winter, and that’s their introduction to Eleanor of Aquitaine. Also, there is a less-known version of the film with Glenn Close, but it’s more recent, so people who may not have seen the Hepburn version may have seen the Close version.
There are probably American historical figures that Americans learn about in school, but people in the UK would not know about, save for a movie. I really don’t know who that might be off-hand, though.