Uncle Tom's Cabin

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Apr 2015 · Sold by HarperCollins

About this ebook

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ground breaking story follows a number of characters through their vastly different journeys and disparate points of view. Whether on the road to freedom travelling the Underground Railroad, or remaining in captivity, Stowe’s narrative exposed the bleak and harrowing nature of slavery to her contemporary society. The story’s central character Uncle Tom, whose affectionate owners are forced to sell him when they fall on hard times, finds himself being treated appallingly by his new slave-master, which tests his resolve and challenges his faith.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is credited with helping to fuel the abolitionist cause in the decades before the American Civil War and it shaped many of the other slave narratives of the era, such as Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Ann Jacobs. Uncle Tom’s Cabin became one of the best-selling novels of the 19th century, and helped to establish the genre of sentimental fiction. It is estimated that over three million people have attended a stage play or musical adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the story has also been adapted for the screen, most recently into a television movie starring Samuel L. Jackson in 1987.

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About the author

Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American author and abolitionist. Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, she was raised in a deeply religious family and educated in a seminary school run by her elder sister. In her adult life, Stowe married biblical scholar and abolitionist Calvin Ellis Stowe, who would later go on to work as Harriet’s literary agent, and the two participated in the Underground Railroad by providing temporary refuge for escaped slaves travelling to the American North. Shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War, Stowe published her most famous work, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a stark and sympathetic depiction of the desperate lives of African American slaves. The book went on to see unprecedented sales, and informed American and European attitudes towards abolition. In the years leading up to her death, suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, Stowe is said to have begun re-writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, almost word-for-word, believing that she was writing the original manuscript once again. Stowe died in July 1, 1896 at the age of eighty-five.