A candid inquiry into the intertwining of religious and sexual fervor, and a telling portrait of the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, this novel foreshadows the rise of naturalism in American literature.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by...

This Faustian tale of the spiritual disintegration of a young minister, written in the 1890s, deals 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 20th century. Its author, Harold Frederic, a London correspondent for the New York Times, wrote the novel two years before his death.

Novelist Harold Frederic (1856-1898) played a critical role in the development of realistic American fiction. His best work analyzes the narrow-mindedness of the small towns of his native upper New York State. Frederic's most famous novel, The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), chronicles the life of an idealistic young Methodist minister who, as he falls under the influence of progressive ideas, becomes a skeptic. He comes to regard his old religion as intellectually and spiritually bankrupt, but in the process is nearly destroyed by those who condemn him for "going to the bad".

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...