That follows.
Lew Wallace, a Civil War general, supposedly lost his faith due to what he experienced in that conflict, but he’d been a lawyer before. /rimshot
After the war, and bored with lawyering, he took up writing, and thanks to a chance encounter on a train, wound up with “He Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ” (1880).
One of his descendants wrote about this:
[snip] As a little girl, I was very proud of Lew. He had been a Union general in the Civil War. He had put Billy the Kid in jail (we had a letter from the Kid hanging in our back hall). He was a diplomat and, of course, a best-selling author. Editions of Ben-Hur took up serious shelf space in our house. I even have dim memories of my parents bringing home an illustrated program from the 1959 premiere of the film starring Charlton Heston. What I didn’t have was familiarity with the book that started it all, because Ben-Hur in its original version is a tough slog for today’s readers. But while adapting it I not only became a great fan of the text but also came to understand the surprisingly moving backstory. [/snip]
Whoops, typo!