Vintage Pulp | Nov 12 2009 |
It's a story that's always in the running.
Cover art for a French edition of Ben-Hur, circa 1930s. The book was written by Lew Wallace, who, among other things, was an army general on the Union side in the U.S. Civil War. His Biblical epic played a profound role in causing religious leaders of the time to finally reverse their longstanding condemnation of novels as tools of evil. Ben-Hur has since been adapted into a motion picture four times, most definitively in 1959 with Charlton Heston in the lead. The English version of Ben-Hur was first published today in 1880.