His role in the life and death of Billy the Kid earned Wallace a bit part in the dime novels that burnished the outlaw’s legend, but it was nothing compared to the celebrity his own novel brought him. “Let him out!” barked Grant, seeing that he was being afforded a handicap. An account of the impromptu race appeared in the Denver News on Feb. 19, 1905, a few days after Wallace had died. Wallace accepted his invitation and suggested they take up a subject near to Ingersoll’s heart: the existence of God. Wallace himself had struggled financially through much of his life. As had been the case with its source, the play failed to impress critics (“the piece rises above the level of ordinary melodrama in only two or three scenes,” wrote the New York Times), but audiences couldn’t stay away. Wallace who wrote “Ben-Hur” Crossword Clue. Alerted to the presence of a Confederate garrison in a nearby town, Wallace decided to put his Zouaves into action. It had been a sapling then; it was now full-grown. But as he wrote, his outlook changed. After a mile or two, Grant called a halt—and offered to buy Old John on the spot. But even this failed to satisfy him. But Ben-Hur was among the first American novels to make Jesus a full-fledged character in its story. Wallace moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico after his appointment as governor of the New Mexico Territory, where he served from August 1878 to March 1881. It’s one of the great if little known ironies in the history of American literature: Having set out to win another soul to the side of skepticism, Robert Ingersoll instead inspired a Biblical epic that would rival the actual Bible for influence and popularity in Gilded Age America—and a folk story that has been reborn, in one medium or another, in every generation since. He is wearing the uniform of the Zouave, elite units of the French Army that borrowed their tactics and uniform style from Algerian fighters. It was the letter Wallace had sent to the commander of the neighboring division at Shiloh, announcing his plans to use the shunpike should trouble arise. Next to his home in nearby Crawfordsville he erected an idiosyncratic study—Ben-Hur’s face peers out from a frieze above the entrance—where he could pursue his avocations. “The force of loss left even many believers unable to abandon lingering uncertainties about God’s benevolence.” One of the only rivals to Ben-Hur’s popularity in the 19th century was Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Gates Ajar (1868), which painted for its readers a detailed, and comforting, portrait of the heaven that awaited the thousands of dead soldiers. His epitaph is a line taken from Ben-Hur: “I would not give one hour of life as a Soul for a thousand years of life as a man.”. Nyt Clues / By Rex Parker'son. Courtesy of General Lew Wallace Study and Museum, The details of Wallace’s interview with Longstreet are lost to history, but it’s likely the meeting was cordial. “Neither love nor money,” he said, “can buy Old John.”, Photo by Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images. The Jew Judah Ben-Hur is wrongly accused by his former friend, the Roman Messala, of attempting to kill a Roman “The messiah appears before us as I always wished him depicted to men,” wrote a Roman Catholic priest. Wallace’s first official duty as minister to Turkey was to relieve his predecessor—Former Gen. James Longstreet, the trusted Lee lieutenant who had fought at Chickamauga, Antietam, and Gettysburg. By the time Wallace returned from Constantinople four years later, Ben-Hur had become Harper & Brothers’ top-selling title. In his reply to Hayne, he expressed delight at receiving such high praise from “the Singer of the South.” He then delicately asked the poet if he had any objections to Wallace’s publishing the letter. It became the best-selling novel in America until Gone With the Wind eclipsed it. He wasn’t just a writer of romances; he was a romantic himself, with a chivalric sense of honor, and he was plagued by the blot left on his reputation by the Battle of Shiloh. Unsatisfied with Grant’s pardon, Wallace continued his efforts to clear his name, taking any chance he could get to refight the battle. One clergyman wrote to Wallace of “the immense missionary work Ben-Hur has done. Within a few months, he was relieved of his field command. As a boy, Wallace had snuck into the stately Elston home to behold two domestic items unfamiliar to him: a sofa and a piano. “I want to thank you for that book,” he wrote to Wallace. Lew Wallace’s grave in Crawfordsville, Ind. He had his doubts about America’s nascent imperialism, but if there was to be a fight, he wanted to be in the thick of it. And it has been made into a host of movies. Instead, he got a suffering Savior. Wallace confessed in his autobiography that he took up writing as a diversion from studying law. He reminded Grant that he’d fought bravely at Donelson and acted with dispatch to save Washington in 1864. Most of the book was written during Wallace's spare time in the evening, while traveling, and at home in Crawfordsville, Indiana, where he often wrote outdoors during the summer, sitting under a favorite beech tree near his home. Shiloh was initially hailed as a Union triumph. In her thorough study of Wallace’s military career, Shadow of Shiloh (2010), Gail Stephens makes a compelling case that Wallace’s version of events is the most logical. If he had any misgivings about executing Wirz (whose degree of culpability for the camp’s atrocities has long been a matter of dispute), he didn’t record them. “Throughout the rank and file of our steady churchgoing people the man who is ignorant of Ben-Hur, who cannot relay vividly every point of the chariot race, is set down as beyond the pale in both literature and religion,” wrote the New York Post. But at the Reunion held just two years later, in Cincinnati, blue mingled with gray: Joe Johnston, John Bell Hood, and Robert E. Lee’s nephew Fitzhugh were among the invitees, and the order of the day was celebrating the heroism of combatants on both sides of the conflict. Wallace refused. Wallace who wrote "Ben-Hur" The clue "Wallace who wrote "Ben-Hur"" was last spotted by us at the New York Times Crossword on June 28 2019. In the spring of 1898, as tensions between the United States and Spain mounted, Lew Wallace sent a telegram to Secretary of War Russell Alger. “Why did they not come?” he wrote to his wife Susan. In Judah Ben-Hur, he created the hero he wished he’d been at Shiloh, a paragon of strength and pluck. He finished the book in March of 1880. A Zouave who sustained minor injuries after being shot in the belt buckle represented the lone Union casualty. Wallace at the battle of Shiloh,” Grant wrote. But years of lobbying by the New York producers Marc Klaw and Abraham Erlanger eventually broke him down. After a series of defeats at the hands of Grant, the rebels had been forced to yield central Tennessee and consolidate their forces in Corinth, Miss., home to a strategic railroad crossing. That battle, in which 26,000 men were killed or wounded, scarred all of its participants. When the curtain fell after the crucifixion, many in the rapt audience failed to applaud—not because they hadn’t enjoyed the production, but because they weren’t accustomed to clapping for Christ. Hello everyone! For Wallace’s part in creating Ben-Hur, we know from documentary evidence that he was already well-advanced in writing the novel before the time he claimed the interaction with Ingersoll took place. Wallace was 15. At the outset of Judah’s trials, as he’s being marched off to slavery, a young man in Nazareth wordlessly offers the prisoner a drink of water: “...looking up, [Judah] saw a face he never forgot—the face of a boy about his own age, shaded by locks of yellowish bright chestnut hair; a face lighted by dark-blue eyes, at the time so soft, so appealing, so full of love and holy purpose, that they had all the power of command and will.”. Harper’s Weekly drawings of Lew Wallace’s 11th Indiana Zouaves, made in 1861 after their successful raid on Romney, West Virginia. Wallace himself never wrote of the race. And it wasn’t just a hit in New York; like the novel, it found a truly national audience. According to Robert and Katharine Morsberger, Wallace’s most comprehensive biographers, he first encountered the Zouaves in a magazine article. Though David Wallace was a West Point graduate, most of his men carried umbrellas and cornstalks in lieu of muskets during their training exercises. Lew Wallace in Zouave uniform, as depicted in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, August 1861. In the past he had been indifferent to religion, but after his talk with Ingersoll his ignorance struck him as problematic, “a spot of deeper darkness in the darkness.” He resolved to devote himself to a study of theology, “if only for the gratification there might be in having convictions of one kind or another.”. Wallace’s detractors would later claim that he had simply lost his way in the Tennessee woods. Ben-Hur, historical novel by Lewis Wallace, published in 1880 and widely translated. Wallace had a Zelig-like knack for insinuating himself into the defining moments of his day. The chariot race was performed using real horses, which galloped on hidden treadmills—a not-unprecedented trick, but a breathtaking one nonetheless. “I had just got to the chariot race when school went in,” she later confesses. One of the earliest fan letters Wallace received came from Paul Hamilton Hayne, a respected poet and editor and a Confederate veteran. Will the world ever acquit me of them?” he wrote. Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, Lew Wallace Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ is a novel by Lew Wallace published by Harper & Brothers on November 12, 1880, and considered "the most influential Christian book of the nineteenth century". “In the event of war,” Alger wrote. (In 1879, a passion play in San Francisco had landed its star in jail, still wearing his halo.) Instead, his regiment was ordered to garrison an unnamed camp at the mouth of the Rio Grande, across the river from a small Mexican smuggler’s outpost, which the soldiers called “Bagdad.” The camp was soon beset with an epidemic of diarrhea so fatal that the survivors ran out of wood for coffins. He spent the rest of 1862 and all of 1863 a general without an army—and worse, for Wallace, a soldier robbed of his honor. Lewis Wallace (1827-1905) Lew Wallace published the book Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ in 1880. “You will be duly notified.” Don’t telegram us, we’ll telegram you. The Wallaces were a prominent if not a wealthy family. Their fears would have magnified my command …”, Not trusting that his letter would have its desired effect, Wallace also visited Grant to plead with him in person. “Would their presence have been too much of a sanction or endorsement for the wild westerner?”. A fun crossword game with each day connected to a different theme. Regional theaters were so eager to host the show that they conducted renovations in order to accommodate the elaborate production. That Judah Ben-Hur finds Christ and wins a great fortune was surely not lost on the novel’s newly affluent readers, North and South. Lew’s grandfather apprehended them a few miles downriver. Ben-Hur was first among them, present in 83 percent of the collections surveyed. Miller notes that for many Americans, seeing Ben-Hur became an annual rite, akin to Christmastime pilgrimages to The Nutcracker today. “Keep quiet as possible and trust to opportunity for a becoming sequel to the brilliant beginning you had,” he wrote. With reluctance, Wallace followed his father into the legal profession, and he was preparing for the bar exam when the United States declared war with Mexico in 1846. In the months that followed, he wrote to Susan despairing of the war’s progress (“defeat follows defeat—mismanagement after mismanagement”) and offering detailed explanations of how he would quickly bring the Confederacy to its knees were he in command. It’s difficult to comprehend death on this scale; now try to imagine being blamed for it. Not long after, he followed his manuscript to New York, where he met with Harper & Brothers, which published the novel despite wariness of its religious overtones. It seems likely that either due to a mistaken assumption on Grant’s part (that Wallace would necessarily take the river road), or an omission on the part of his messenger, Wallace believed his orders were to join up with the Union army as quickly as possible, and he chose the road he believed best suited to that task. He had begun the book in his native Indiana, writing in the shade of what would come to be known as the Ben-Hur beech, and would finish it in Santa Fe. Author of Ben-Hur Had Hoped to Be Restored Up until the time Lew Wallace began to draft the story of Ben Hur he had not cared if there were an afterlife. It could be either. You can also listen to John Swansburg read this piece using the player below: Lew Wallace was making conversation with the other gentlemen in his sleeper car when a man in a nightgown appeared in the doorway. Texas’ Howard Miller, an expert on the play, points to newspaper coverage of a 1907 performance in Toledo, Ohio. The aide found him on the shunpike, headed unwittingly toward the Confederate rear. It convinced Grant of what Wallace had long argued. In his autobiography, Wallace writes that the acclaim the Zouaves won at Romney “astonished nobody so much as ourselves.” But that has the ring of revisionist modesty. I want to talk.”. Ex-rebels were now in the halls of power as well. Few men participated so completely in the postbellum American experience. David, a lawyer, would eventually serve a term as Indiana’s governor and move his family to the state capital. Grant, a gifted horseman, admired Old John and proposed a race back to camp. Hollywood’s Messala is a villain through and through, not only responsible for Judah’s exile, but a cheater in the arena too. Wallace’s novel has since been eclipsed in the American imagination by a bronzed, bare-chested Charlton Heston, careening around the Holy Land in William Wyler's 1959 film adaptation of Ben-Hur, which won a record 11 Academy Awards and was a blockbuster hit for MGM. But when he arrives in the Holy Land he encounters a rabbi from Nazareth, a man promising not an earthly kingdom but a heavenly one. (The other two were Little Lord Fauntleroy and Ramona.) Always a lover of the bold stroke, Wallace had written out his final manuscript in purple ink, a color his critics would have found apt for some of the novel’s loftier passages. Ben-Hur found admirers in other high places. Wallace assented, but reined his horse in as the race began. Grant’s order, issued verbally and transcribed and delivered by an aide, was lost in the course of the battle; its contents would become the subject of acrimonious debate. “I had no future to hope for,” he wrote to Wallace from a YMCA in Kewanee, Ill. “No past but of which I was ashamed.” Ben-Hur, however, inspired Parrish to find religion, and recovery. The play was a runaway hit, a fixture of Broadway and the regional theater for the next 20 years. He was beloved by Wallace and by his men. In the National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. there resides a full-body statue of General Lew Wallace, Civil War hero and author of the literary classic, Ben Hur. Iras, the novel’s femme fatale, derisively refers to Jesus as “the man with the woman’s face”—perhaps with a touch of jealousy. He intends to give you a chance to be shot in every important move.” Wallace’s eagerness to lead every charge would only make his disappearance at Shiloh that much harder to fathom. Grant claimed that he ordered Wallace to march to Pittsburg Landing, via the river road. “The various descriptions surpassed in their attraction, glowing colors, and truthfulness all I have ever read before.” According to a contemporary newspaper account, pastors and school superintendents were fond of pointing out that “the most vivid picture of the Holy Land in the time of Christ was in Ben-Hur.” As a result, “no boy who went to Sunday school could have escaped the story if he tried.” (Teachers who ignored the novel may have done so at their peril. Men and women on both sides of the Mason-Dixon could enjoy Wallace’s tale of martial virtue set safely in the distant past and embrace its message of Christly compassion triumphing over Old Testament vengeance. 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