It has been argued that it acted as a national salve after the Civil War. He was at various times a copyist, a lawyer, a senator, a soldier, an artist, a musician, a luthier, an ambassador, and, most famously, a general, and an author.īen-Hur, Wallace’s second book, was the most widely read novel of the nineteenth-century, dethroning Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Hayes, Theodore Roosevelt, Billy the Kid, and numerous other luminaries of the nineteenth century. Today, at best, it evokes a vague sense of a 1950s film adaptation and a remake in 2016.īorn in 1827 to the future Governor of Indiana (his mother would die when he was seven), Wallace led a life that saw him cross paths with Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, James Garfield, William T. He is perhaps best known as the author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ a novel, though seldom read in our time, was the most popular book of the nineteenth century, second only to the Bible. General Lew Wallace had a long and storied career, though few people outside the circle of Civil War scholars might have heard his name in our era.
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