In 1879, the year before he published Ben-Hur, Wallace – who had been made Governor of New Mexico in 1878 – struck a deal with Billy the Kid, promising to get him immunity from prosecution if the Kid – real name Henry McCarty – agreed to testify against some other criminals. Lew Wallace corresponded with notorious outlaw Billy the Kid. (The fact that poor Judah is falsely accused of a crime and is, as it were, had up on false charges suggests that the Ridley Scott film Gladiator, starring Russell Crowe, was considerably influenced by Wallace’s novel and its film adaptations.) The novel cleverly parallels Ben-Hur’s story with that of Jesus (the subtitle to the novel is A Tale of the Christ), another Jewish figure living under Roman occupation in the same part of the world, and at the same time (we don’t want to give too much away, but the two men’s lives interlink at key moments).Ĥ. The novel’s protagonist, Judah Ben-Hur (a figure invented by Wallace, and not someone who is known in history), is a Jewish nobleman and prince who is taken slave by the Romans (fitted up on a false charge of attempted murder, when a piece of his roof accidentally dropped on the Roman parade passing his house) and becomes a charioteer in the Roman games.
And this was despite slow sales: in the first seven months it didn’t even shift 3,000 copies. It was the bestselling American novel of the nineteenth century. Lew Wallace’s novel Ben-Hur (1880) even outsold that other runaway bestseller, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).
Interesting facts about the Lew Wallace book Ben-Hur, and its subsequent life on filmġ.
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