This Companion provides fresh perspectives on the frequently read classic Uncle Tom's Cabin as well as on topics of perennial interest, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's representation of race, her attitude to reform, and her relationship to the American novel. Cindy Weinstein comprehensively investigates Stowe's impact on the American literary tradition and the novel of social change.

Harriet Beecher Stowe's powerful antislavery novel ""Uncle Tom's Cabin"", published in 1851, caused an immediate sensation and sparked heated debate. This addition to the ""Bloom's Guides"" series examines the structure and characters of the novel and provides critical analysis. Essays discuss the novel as an agent of social change, fairness in the novel, the novel as an abolitionist tract, and more. An annotated bibliography and a listing of other works by the author complement the text.

Describes the life and work of the woman whose famous book "Uncle Tom's Cabin" had a great impact upon the slavery situation in the United States.

"So you're the little woman who started this big war," Abraham Lincoln is said to have quipped when he met Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin converted readers by the thousands to the anti-slavery movement and served notice that the days of slavery were numbered. Overnight Stowe became a celebrity, but to defenders of slavery she was the devil in petticoats. Most writing about Stowe treats her as a literary figure and social reformer while downplaying her Christian faith. But Nancy Koester's biography highlights Stowe’s faith as central to her life -- both her public fight against slavery and her own personal struggle through deep grief to find a gracious God. Having meticulously researched Stowe’s own writings, both published and un-published, Koester traces Stowe's faith pilgrimage from evangelical Calvinism through spiritualism to Anglican spirituality in a flowing, compelling narrative.

The author of Hawthorne in Concord “brings [Stowe] to life in all her glory, in a book at once so dramatic and so subtle that it rivals the best fiction” (Debby Applegate, author of The Most Famous Man in America). Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin forced an ambivalent North to confront the atrocities of slavery, yet it was just one of many accomplishments of the Beechers, the most eminent American family of the nineteenth century. Historian Philip McFarland follows the Beecher clan to the boomtown of Cincinnati, where Harriet’s glimpses of slavery across the Kentucky border moved her to pen Uncle Tom’s Cabin. We meet Harriet’s loves: her father Lyman, her husband Calvin, and her brother Henry, the most famous preacher of his time. As McFarland leads us through Harriet’s ever-changing world, he traces the arc of her literary career from her hard-scrabble beginnings to her ascendancy as the most renowned author of her day. Through the portrait of a defining American family, Loves of Harriet Beecher Stowe opens into an unforgettable rendering of mid-nineteenth century America in the midst of unprecedented social and demographic explosions. To this day, Uncle Tom’s Cabin reverberates as a crucial document in Western culture. “Often dismissed even by her admirers as a pious faculty wife who just happened to write the book of the century, Harriet Beecher Stowe emerges in Philip McFarland’s biography in all her complexity and genius.” —Charles Calhoun, author of Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life and The Gilded Age

Harriet Beecher Stowe is often credited with bringing such attention to the plight of slaves in her most famous novel that she influenced the course of the American Civil War. In this text, Stowe’s work as an abolitionist and author is examined in light of its great historical significance. Students will analyze the importance of Stowe’s work in its contemporary historical context.

Book Review Index provides quick access to reviews of books, periodicals, books on tape and electronic media representing a wide range of popular, academic and professional interests. The up-to-date coverage, wide scope and inclusion of citations for both newly published and older materials make Book Review Index an exceptionally useful reference tool. More than 600 publications are indexed, including journals and national general interest publications and newspapers. Book Review Index is available in a three-issue subscription covering the current year or as an annual cumulation covering the past year.

In the nineteenth century, Uncle Tom's Cabin sold more copies than any book in the world except the Bible. Upon publication, it was quickly translated into thirty-seven languages and has never gone out of print. It remains a controversial and complex text that, along with David Walker's Appeal, Henry David Thoreau's Walden, W. E. B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk, and Helena María Viramontes' Under the Feet of Jesus, among others, stands out as an important text in the progressive struggle for social justice in the United States. This Second Edition is based on the original 1852 book edition, published in two volumes by John P. Jewett and Company, Boston, and includes all original illustrations. The text is accompanied by a preface and detailed explanatory annotations to assist the reader with obscure historical terms and biblical allusions. "Backgrounds and Contexts" includes a wealth of historical documents addressing the issues of slavery and abolitionism. New visuals in the Second Edition include a selection of abolition posters and records of torture. Also newly included is J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur's eyewitness account of slavery as a visitor to the United States, a selection from David Walker's Appeal, and Henrietta King's autobiographical account of the horror of slavery. "Criticism" presents a balanced view of the ongoing controversy over Uncle Tom's Cabin in fifteen reviews and scholarly interpretations spanning more than 150 years of writing about the novel. Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jane P. Tompkins, and Susan M. Ryan, among others, admire Uncle Tom's Cabin for its social vision and artistry, while James Baldwin and Sophia Cantave, among others, argue that the book's racism continues to promote misperceptions and that its prominence does ongoing damage. A Chronology of Stowe's life and work, a Brief Timeline of Slavery in America, and an updated Selected Bibliography are also included.