1890s Leather Bound Book, Lew Wallace's the Fair God

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Title: The Fair God or, the last of the 'Tzins a Tale of the Conquest of Mexico.
Author: Wallace, Lew.
… Read more Title: The Fair God or, the last of the 'Tzins a Tale of the Conquest of Mexico.
Author: Wallace, Lew.
Publisher: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, Boston.
Publication date: 1890.

About this item: This book is General Lew Wallace's first novel, though he is best known for his 1880 novel Ben-Hur, especially the line "Hate keeps a man alive" that does not actually appear in the original. His popularity with Victorians was encouraged by their pastors, who generally swore off novels because of their immoral influence. The book made Lew Wallace a celebrity, sought out for speaking engagements, political endorsements, and newspaper interviews. Wallace told a New York Times reporter in 1893, "That person lacks the true American spirit who has not tried to paint a picture, write a book, or get out a patent on something." Or, he added, "tried to play some musical instrument. There you have the genius of the true American in those four - art, literature, invention, music." Not coincidentally, Lew Wallace himself excelled at all four. Besides being a Civil War hero, the governor of New Mexico, and later the ambassador to Turkey, the Indiana native made and played his own violins, sketched and painted with skill, and held eight patents for various inventions, including a retractable reel hidden inside a fishing rod handle. But it was in literature that Wallace truly made his mark. He is the only novelist honored in the National Statuary Hall of the U.S. Capitol.
Post Civil War, he found himself dissatisfied with his early careers as a soldier, politician, and lawyer (the last he described as “that most detestable of occupations”) and began writing in earnest again. He had his first novel, The Fair God, published in 1873. A tale about the conquest of the Aztec Empire by the Spanish, its inspiration came from Wallace’s reading of William Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico and from his own experiences there.

Measures: 7.63 H x 5.19 D x 1.25 W inches.

Description: 586 Pp. 8vo. Period brown half calf and matching marble boards/end papers/leaf edge, gilt tooled spine, red title label, Morocco lettering.

Condition notes: Very good; moderate edge wear, exposed boards at corner tips, strong square spine, clean slight age-toned text pages. A nice copy. See less