The Damnation of Theron Ware or Illumination [Paperback]

Published in 1896,The Damnation of Theron Ware or Illuminationis 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.“[Frederic’s] most brilliant achievement.” —Edmund WilsonJoyce Carol Oates, the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, is the author of numerous works of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and criticism. Noteworthy among her many novels arethem, Blonde, and the recentMiddle Age: A Romance.Chapter I

No such throng had ever before been seen in the building during all its eight years of existence. People were wedged together most uncomfortably upon the seats; they stood packed in the aisles and overflowed the galleries; at the back, in the shadows underneath these galleries, they formed broad, dense masses about the doors, through which it would be hopeless to attempt a passage.

The light, given out from numerous tin-lined circles of flaring gas-jets arranged on the ceiling, fell full upon a thousand uplifted faces—some framed in bonnets or juvenile curls, others bearded or crowned with shining baldness—but all alike under the spell of a dominant emotion which held features in abstracted suspense and focussed every eye upon a common objective point.

The excitement of expectancy reigned upon each row of countenances, was visible in every attitude—nalC.