When published in March, 1896, The Damnation of Theron Ware or Illumination became a best seller in England, and was also popular in the United States. Critics considered it to be an important novel. In Cosmopolitan, Harry Thurston Peck praised it for its realistic depiction of American life, "the good and the bad, the fine and the crude, the enlightened and the ignorant" (quoted by Scott Donaldson in his introduction to the novel). Leading novelist and critic W. D. Howells, reviewing the novel in Munsey's in 1897, declared it to be a "moral" book of "great power." He also commented that at the end of the novel :

. . . although you have carried a hazy notion in your mind of the sort of man Ware was, you realize, for the first time, that the author has never for a moment represented him anywhere to you as a good or honest...