We consider the stochastic partial differential equation (SPDE) \(\begin{aligned} \partial _t u = \tfrac{1}{2} \partial ^2_x u + b(u) + \sigma (u) \dot{W}, \end{aligned}\) where \(u=u(t,x)\) is defined for \((t,x)\in (0,\infty )\times \mathbb {R}\) and \(\dot{W}\) denotes space-time white noise. We prove that this SPDE is well posed solely under the assumptions that the initial condition u(0) is bounded and measurable, and b and \(\sigma \) are locally Lipschitz continuous functions having at most linear growth with regularly behaved local Lipschitz constants. Our method is based on a truncation argument together with moment bounds and tail estimates of the truncated solution. The novelty of our method is in the pointwise nature of the truncation argument.