Uncle Tom's Cabin

Overview

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 Cabin was 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. .

Editorial Reviews

Gr 10 Up-Perry Keenlyside's abridged rendering of this classic tale adequately tells Harriet Beecher Stowe's antislavery story. Uncle Tom, a dignified and strong man, endures ownership by two men who treat him kindly: first by George Shelby who keeps Tom's family together until economics forces a sale, and second by Augustine St. Clare who comes to respect Tom's character and all he stands for. When Augustine dies, Tom is sold to the cruel Simon Legree. It is at Legree's farm that Tom dies as a result of one of his beatings. Although Tom suffered a wavering in his faith at the hands of Simon Legree, it is here that Tom has a religious reawakening and dies strong in his faith. In its condensed form, the religious aspects of the novel seem to be given added significance, but perhaps that is only right given the social climate out of which this novel was born. Liza Ross reads the story, assuming several voices for each of the different characters. In a few places, the reading of the tags describing a voice we just heard seems awkward and redundant. Overall, Ross's voice is a convincing one, able to engage even today's visually oriented students. A music interlude signals the break between chapters, a good stopping point for discussion.-Suzanne Goodman, Park High School, Livingston, MT Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, one of nine children of the distinguished Congregational minister and stern Calvinist, Lyman Beecher. Of her six brothers, five became ministers, one of whom, Henry Ward Beecher, was considered the finest pulpit orator of his day. In 1832 Harriet Beecher went with her family to Cincinnati, Ohio. There she taught in her sister's school and began publishing sketches and stories. In 1836 she married the Reverend Calvin E. Stowe, one of her father's assistants at the Lane Theological Seminary and a strong antislavery advocate. They lived in Cincinnati for 18 years, and six of her children were born there. The Stowes moved to Brunswick, Maine, in 1850, when Calvin Stowe became a professor at Bowdoin College. Long active in abolition causes and knowledgeable about the atrocities of slavery both from her reading and her years in Cincinnati, with its close proximity to the South, Stowe was finally impelled to take action with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. By her own account, the idea of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) first came to her in a vision while she was sitting in church. Returning home, she sat down and wrote out the scene describing the death of Uncle Tom and was so inspired that she continued to write on scraps of grocer's brown paper after her own supply of writing paper gave out. She then wrote the book's earlier chapters. Serialized first in the National Era (1851--52), an important abolitionist journal with national circulation, Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in book form in March 1852. It was an immediate international bestseller; 10,000 copies were sold in less than a week, 300,000 within a year, and 3 million before the start of the Civil War. Family legend tells of President Abraham Lincoln (see Vol. 3) saying to Stowe when he met her in 1862: "So this is the little lady who made this big war " Whether he did say it or not, we will never know, since Stowe left no written record of her interview with the president. But he would have been justified in saying it. Certainly, no other single book, apart from the Bible, has ever had any greater social impact on the United States, and for many years its enormous historical interest prevented many from seeing the book's genuine, if not always consistent, literary merit. The fame of the novel has also unfortunately overshadowed the fiction that Stowe wrote about her native New England: The Minister's Wooing (1859), Oldtown Folks (1869), Poganuc People (1878), and The Pearl of Orr's Island (1862), the novel that, according to Sarah Orne Jewett, began the local-color movement in New England. Here Stowe was writing about the world and its people closest and dearest to her, recording their customs, their legends, and their speech. As she said of one of these novels, "It is more to me than a story. It is my resume of the whole spirit and body of New England." 020

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Additional Info

Imprint

Random House

Filesize

574.60 KB

Number of Pages

576

eBook ISBN

9780553897692