Lew Wallace Books in Order

Lew Wallace was born Lewis Wallace on April 10, 1827, in Brookville, Indiana, the second son of David Wallace and Esther French Test Wallace. His family moved to Covington while he was young, then to Indianapolis after his father entered statewide politics. Wallace later made Crawfordsville his lasting home.

School was never an easy fit. He skipped classes, preferred fishing and hunting, and learned much of what mattered to him by reading, drawing, and following his own curiosities. His father, a West Point graduate who later became Indiana's governor, gave military life a powerful place in the boy's imagination.

Wallace began working as a county clerk in his teens, studied law, and started an early version of The Fair God while reading about the Spanish conquest of Mexico. He served as a lieutenant in the Mexican-American War, returned to Indiana to qualify as a lawyer in 1849, and practiced in Covington. In 1852 he married Susan Elston, a writer and a steady partner throughout his life.

Then the Civil War changed the scale of everything.

After helping Indiana raise troops, Wallace led the 11th Indiana Volunteers and rose quickly to major general. He fought in the campaigns around Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, but the delayed arrival of his division at Shiloh shadowed his military reputation for years. In 1864, his smaller force held off a much larger Confederate army at Monocacy long enough to help protect Washington, D.C. After the war, he served on the military commission that tried the Lincoln assassination conspirators and headed the commission that tried Andersonville commandant Henry Wirz.

Public service took him far from Indiana. Wallace served as governor of the New Mexico Territory from 1878 to 1881, then as the United States minister to Turkey until 1885. Those jobs fed his interest in history, politics, faith, and the places where cultures meet.

Writing had started as a sideline. It became the work that lasted.

The Fair God, published in 1873, looks at the Spanish conquest of Mexico and the fall of the Aztec Empire. Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ followed in 1880, telling the story of Judah Ben-Hur, a Jewish nobleman driven by betrayal, loss, and a search for justice under Roman rule. Readers often come for the chariot race, but the novel also spends real time with questions of revenge, belief, and what a person does after life has knocked them down.

Wallace kept returning to big historical settings. The Prince of India moves to fifteenth-century Constantinople as the Ottoman Empire closes in on the city. His smaller biblical works, including The Boyhood of Christ and The First Christmas from Ben-Hur, revisit the world around Jesus with a mix of storytelling and inquiry. He also wrote a play, poems, biographies of Benjamin Harrison, and an autobiography that shows how closely his writing and public life stayed tied together.

Back in Crawfordsville, Wallace built a private study where he could write, paint, and work among his books and collections. He died there on February 15, 1905, before finishing his autobiography. Susan Wallace and writer Mary Hannah Krout helped prepare the two-volume memoir for publication in 1906, leaving readers with Wallace's own account of a life that ranged from Indiana courtrooms to battlefields, government offices, and imagined worlds from Mexico to Constantinople.