The Damnation of Theron Ware / Edition 1

by Harold Frederic

Overview

This tale of an ordinary man depicts, on a larger scale, the fall of intellectual America from innocence to knowledge at the end of the nineteenth century. Through his involvement with three women, Theron Ware, a small-town Methodist minister, finds that his abstract, absolute notions about himself and his world lead to doubt and confusion. Uncertain in his faith, Ware is alone and unprepared to meet the moral, scientific, and aesthetic ambiguities of the new century. Employing the documentary detail, pragmatic attitude, and comic vision of conventional realism, The Damnation of Theron Ware also foreshadows the rise of naturalism - and the works of Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis. As Scott Donaldson says in his Introduction, "It would be hard to imagine a novel more sensitive to and reflective of the ideas and controversies coursing through the American eighteen-nineties."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781573921695
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	11/01/1997
Series:	Literary Classics Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	322
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	16 Years

About the Author

Harold Frederic (1856-1898) was an American novelist and journalist. Born in Utica, New York, he was raised by his mother following his father’s tragic death in a railroad accident. At fifteen, he found work as a photographer in Utica before moving to Boston, later changing careers to become a reporter for The Utica Daily Observer. Frederic married Grace Green in 1877 and by 1882 was the editor of The Albany Evening Journal, raising his five children in the state capital. In 1884, he moved to London to work as a correspondent for the New York Times, sending for his family to join him after five years apart. In 1896, while living with his mistress Kate Lyon, Frederic published his bestselling novel The Damnation of Theron Ware, proving himself as a gifted American writer working in the realist tradition. At the height of his literary career, Frederic suffered a sudden stroke in London and died shortly thereafter.

Table of Contents

	Note on the Text	vi
	Introduction	vii
Part I1
Part II105
Part III181
Part IV263
	Suggestions for Further Reading	345

Editorial Reviews

Containing the realism of Howells, the moral complexity of James, and the comic manner of Mark Twain, the novel—a finer book, incidentally, than Lewis's Elmer Gantry—warrants reading.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

The Damnation of Theron Ware seems likely to survive...The combination of delicate mannerliness and merciless savagery with which Frederic sets about abasing Theron is not easy to describe; but, if one could make the admittedly prodigious effort of imagining an Emma written from the point of view of Mr. Elton by an ebullient exile from Utica, New York (and ending with the full power of an Irish-American Emma's scorn turned upon the luckless person), some idea of its shocking comprehensivity might be grasped.

Times Literary Supplement

Of great interest both as a novel and as a double-barrelled social document.

Manchester Guardian

A minor classic of realism.”

Pulitzer Prize–winning literary critic Jonathan Yardley