Staff Pick
This novel must be read in the context of its own time. Looking at the book with present-day eyes, it seems to contain not characters but caricatures. The characters in this book became larger than life over time, and a series of emotions attach to them that were not intended in the beginning. Beautiful and poignant, Uncle Tom's Cabin changed history. Upon meeting the author, Abraham Lincoln said, "So you're the little lady who wrote the book that made this great war." She replied, "I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation." While most of the book is painful to read, it is a sprawling story full of amazing characters and horrific events. It is a "slice of life" that we, as modern readers, can never truly understand, but it is well worth the uncomfortable reading in order to honor those who lived it. Recommended By Dianah H., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
There may be no other novel in American history as significant as
Uncle Tom's Cabin. A feat of gripping storytelling--the first American work of fiction to become an international bestseller--no other book so effectively expressed the moral case against the "peculiar institution" of slavery.
Oxford University Press is pleased to announce a special 150th anniversary edition of this American classic. This volume features a new introduction by Charles Johnson, recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship and winner of the National Book Award for his 1990 novel Middle Passage. Johnson examines Uncle Tom's Cabin with an eye that is at once appreciative and critical, discussing its considerable craft, its impact on its 1852 audience, and its "ineluctably racist" view of African Americans. He describes how Stowe created vibrant and dramatic characters from all levels of Southern society--the mulatto genius George Harris, his light-skinned wife Eliza, the vicious slave trader Dan Haley, the guilt-ridden Augustine St. Clare--hurling them along truly exciting plotlines. She also infused her book with her then-controversial awareness of the humanity of black men and women, giving her audience a sense of the personal reality of the horrors of slavery. But even as sympathetic an author as Stowe, Johnson observes, substituted one kind of racism for another, depicting her black characters with a patronizing condescension.
A classic of American fiction, a pivotal moment in history, and a cultural touchstone, Uncle Tom's Cabin has not lost its relevance or its power. With this insightful new introduction by one of our finest writers, it deserves a place on a bookshelf in every home.
Review
"Shortly after its publication and within Stowe's lifetime, it transcended the category of literature to become that rarest of products: a cultural artifact; a Rosetta stone for black images in American fiction, theater, and film--not so much a novel, one might say, as an experience inseparable from the events that precipitated the Civil War. ('So this,' Abraham Lincoln said, famously, when he met Stowe, 'is the little lady who wrote the book that made this great war.') It has been the Urtext or common coin for discussions about slavery for a century and a half, one woman's very influential interpretation of the Peculiar Institution--an interpretation that we may love or hate, admire or despise, defend or reject, in whole or in part. It is nonetheless a story that so permeates white popular and literary culture, and sits so high astride nineteenth-century American fiction, that it simply can never be ignored." --from the Introduction by Charles Johnson
About the Author
Charles Johnson is Pollock Chair in Humanities at the University of Washington. One of the most admired American writers of recent decades, he is the author of four novels (including
Middle Passage, which won the National Book Award), numerous short stories, and more than twenty screenplays.