Uncle Tom's Cabin: Introduction by Alfred Kazin [Hardcover]

 

Uncle Tom, Topsy, Sambo, Simon Legree, little Eva: their names are American bywords, and all of them are characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe's remarkable novel of the pre-Civil War South.Uncle Tom's Cabinwas revolutionary in 1852 for its passionate indictment of slavery and for its presentation of Tom, a man of humanity, as the first black hero in American fiction. Labeled racist and condescending by some contemporary critics, it remains a shocking, controversial, and powerful work -- exposing the attitudes of white nineteenth-century society toward the peculiar institution and documenting, in heartrending detail, the tragic breakup of black Kentucky families sold down the river. An immediate international sensation,Uncle Tom's Cabinsold 300,000 copies in the first year, was translated into thirty-seven languages, and has never gone out of print: its political impact was immense, its emotional influence immeasurable.

"Uncle Tom's Cabin is the most powerful and enduring work of art ever written about American slavery."
—Alfred KazinHarriet Beecher Stowe, a prolific writer best remembered today for Uncle Tom's Cabin, was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, on June 14, 1811, into a prominent New England family. Her father, Lyman Beecher, was a well-known Congregational minister, and her brother Henry Ward Beecher became a distinguished preacher, orator, and lecturer. Like all the Beechers she grew up with a strong sense of wanting to improve humanity. At the age of thirteen Harriet Beecher enrolled in the Hartford Female Seminary and subsequently taught there until 1832, when the family moved to Cincinnati. In Ohio she was an instructor at a school founded by her elder sister Catharine, and she soon began publishing short stories in the Western Monthly Magazine. 

Four years later, in 1836, Harriet Beecher married Calvin Stowe, a respected biblical scholar and theologian by wlÏ