Yes, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym (1838) is based upon actual events.
The adventures of J. N. Reynolds is about a stowaway who survived a mutiny, cannibalism, and other adventures.
George F. Babbitt, the lead character in Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (1922), is a real-estate dealer in Zenith, an average American city. He is married to Myra Babbitt; his children are named Verona and Ted.
The Babylonian epic The Epic of Gilgamesh dates back to about 2000 B.c. It concerns the adventures of the hero Gilgamesh and the “wild man” Enkidu, and Gilgamesh’s grief over Enkidu’s death.
Poet Vachel Lindsay killed himself by drinking Lysol, in 1931 at age fifty-two.
New Jersey novelist Edward Stratemeyer created the Bobbsey Twins, under the pseudonym Laura Lee Hope.
Ahab’s harpooneers in Moby Dick were Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo.
It was not Mark Twain who said the phrase. The quote first appeared in an editorial in the Hartford Courant of August 24, 1897, probably written by associate editor Charles Dudley Warner. Warner had collaborated with Twain on The Gilded Age (1873).