The juggernaut Harper & Brothers greatly aided sales of Ben-Hur through its distribution and advertising policies, particularly by including excerpts in school readers. Henry Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis? is the best example of a popular novel whose author found inspiration from reading Ben-Hur. However, Ben-Hur created a resurgence of its literary type. Literature had moved away from historical, romantic, adventure fiction the new trend was to write realistic fiction about contemporary life. He completed the final chapters of the novel, especially those dealing with the crucifixion of Christ, while he was serving as Governor of the New Mexico Territory.īen-Hur was an unusual novel for its time. Wallace wrote most of his masterpiece underneath a beech tree in Crawfordsville, Indiana. In a preface to “The First Christmas,” Wallace recounts some of the process of writing Ben-Hur, including a conversation with noted agnostic Robert G. The novel featured friendship, betrayal, revenge, love lost, love regained, redemption, and, of course, a chariot race. He framed the tale through the eyes of a young Jewish noble, Judah Ben-Hur.
Although a novel with Jesus Christ as the protagonist would be a hard sell with the American public, Wallace began writing. “It seems now that when I sit down finally in the old man’s gown and slippers, helping the cat to keep the fireplace warm, I shall look back upon Ben-Hur as my best performance…” Lew writing under the Ben-Hur Beech The Novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christįollowing his first novel, The Fair God (1873), Lew Wallace believed he could make a career for himself in writing. There have even been American towns named after Ben-Hur. The Supreme Tribe of Ben-Hur, a national fraternal organization founded upon Ben-Hur, later reformed into Ben-Hur Life Insurance. Ben-Hur has also been adapted into several cartoons and a musical.īen-Hur‘s impact on American culture is larger than the dramatic adaptations alone. That dramatization was followed by the motion picture productions in 1907, 1925, 1959, and 2016. The novel grew in such popularity during Wallace’s lifetime that it was adapted into a stage play in 1899. He did most of his work underneath a beech tree near his residence in Crawfordsville, Indiana. Wallace had been researching and writing the novel for seven years. “My God, did I set all of this in motion?” –Lew Wallaceīen-Hur: A Tale of the Christ by General Lew Wallace was published by Harper & Brothers on November 12, 1880.
0 kommentar(er)
