“The best books live by the appeal they make to the heart, even more than by the appeal they make to reason … [T]hey trouble the waters of sympathy within us, and keep them from stagnation.”
– W. J. Dawson, The Making of Manhood (1890)Just such an appeal to the heart has made former Union General Lew Wallace's novel Ben-Hur a literary, stage, and film phenomenon for more than 120 years. In fact, as the historian Victor Davis Hanson observes, this was a book like no other previously published in America:
Wallace's novel began the strange nexus in American life, for good or ill, between literature, motion pictures, advertising, and popular culture. The novel led to the stage and then to the movies, but in the process it spun out entire ancillary industries of songs, skits, ads, clothes, and fan clubs, ensuring that within fifty years of its publication, nearly every American had heard the word “Ben-Hur” without necessarily ever reading the book.
When published in 1880, however, and long before it became a cultural phenomenon, Ben-Hur astounded and inspired readers with its pious affect. For many, it was probably the first and only novel they ever perused; such readers in fact considered it less an entertaining fiction and more a devotional text with which they could, and did, connect in a spiritually uplifting fashion.
