: Re: Is it plagiarism to adapt a known figure into a fictional charcter? What if I decide to write a story with a character based off a historical figure but under a different name? For example:

@Ravi5107385

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First point, as Lauren Ipsum indicated, be very, very careful about taking a living person as your model. Taking a dead person as your model could also give you problems if that person was a writer (a category which could include people primarily famous for other reasons), and his or her writings are still in copyright. Whether this (putting in-copyright words from a dead author into the mouth of a fictional character) counts as plagiarism or simple breach of copyright I'm not sure. I am not a lawyer. But check here to see how long copyright lasts after the death of an author. For a long-lived author it can be surprising how long their work remains in copyright.

If the person from whose writings you quote has been dead for centuries, you are safe legally. Assuming the John Adams you mean is the second president of the US who died in 1826, you'd be fine.

I must confess, however, that as described your story sounds as if it might feel as though it violated the informal 'contract' between author and readers. If your readers are sufficiently well versed in American history that they spot the words depicted as being said by Tom really originated with John Adams they are likely to think that you couldn't be bothered to think up original dialogue for your character. If they are not sufficiently historically aware to spot the Adams link it might as well not be there. That said, I've seen this sort of thing pulled off well as a twist ending, e.g. by using real incidents taken from the historical record the story gets the reader to dislike a character whose name is cleverly concealed, and then it turns out they were some famous popular hero.

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