The Damnation of Theron Ware (The John Harvard Library) - Softcover

Frederic, Harold

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674190017 ISBN 13: 9780674190016

Publisher: Belknap Press, 1996

Synopsis

This Faustian tale of the spiritual disintegration of a young minister, written in the 1890s, deals subtly and powerfully with the impact of science on innocence and the collective despair that marked the transition into the modern age. In its realism, The Damnation of Theron Ware foreshadows Howells; in its conscious imagery it prefigures Norris, Crane, Henry James, and the "symbolic realism" of the twentieth century. Its author, Harold Frederic, internationally famous as London correspondent for the New York Times, wrote the novel two years before his death.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

Published in 1896, "The Damnation of Theron Ware or Illumination is a profound psychological portrait of the spiritual undoing of a guileless Methodist minister who is taken in by a rural townspeople's various progressive ideas, from liberalism to bohemianism, only to be spurned by them for being too conventional. Described by Everett Carter as "among the four or five best novels written by an American during the nineteenth century," the novel, as Joyce Carol Oates writes in her Introduction, has "shrewd, disturbing insights into the human pysche."
This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the text of the authoritative Harold Frederic Edition.

About the Author

Harold Frederic (1856–1898) was an Anglo-American journalist and novelist. Frederic was born in Utica, New York to Presbyterian parents. After his father was killed in a train accident when Frederic was 18 months old, the boy was raised primarily by his mother. He finished school at fifteen, and soon began work as a photographer. For four years he was a photographic touch-up artist in his hometown and in Boston. In 1875 he began work as a proofreader for the Utica Herald and then the Utica Daily Observer. Frederic later became a reporter, and by 1882 he was editor of the Albany Evening Journal. Two years later he went to live in England as London correspondent of the New York Times, and was soon recognized for his ability both as a writer and as a talker. He wrote several early stories, but it was not until he published Illumination (1896), better known by its American title, The Damnation of Theron Ware, followed by Gloria Mundi (1898), that his gifts as a novelist were fully realized. Jonathan Yardley called Damnation "a minor classic of realism". Frederic married Grace Green Williams in 1877, and they had five children.

Edition details

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0674190017
• ISBN 13: 9780674190016
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 384