...selected paragraphs from an article about Lew Wallace:


On April 29, 1881, New Mexico Governor Lew Wallace sat down in Santa Fe's Palace of the Governors and on official stationery wrote a two-page letter to his wife, Susan. She was back in their native Indiana awaiting the end of his tempestuous two-and-one-half-year tenure as the territory's presidentially appointed chief executive.
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The bearded, bespectacled Wallace--an ex-Civil War hero and renaissance man whose epic Biblical novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, partly written in Santa Fe, had just been published to worldwide attention--was rarin' to leave New Mexico. He had submitted his resignation and was waiting impatiently for the arrival of his successor, Lionel Sheldon.
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Wallace was a widely celebrated figure when he died in Crawfordsville, Indiana, in 1905 at age 77. His many books had earned him more in royalties than any American novelist before him. With maybe 1 million copies printed in several languages, Ben-Hur became an international household word a half-century before the 1959 Oscar-winning movie starring Charlton Heston.