Uncle Tom's Cabin Or, Life Among the Lowly

by Stowe, Harriet Beecher

• ISBN13: 9780140390032
• ISBN10: 0140390030
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1981-06-25
• Publisher: Penguin Classics

Summary

Originally published beginning June 5, 1851 as a serial in The National Era, an abolitionist weekly published in Washington, DC., Stowe's classic novel was finished forty-three chapters and one year later. John Jewett's small publishing house published the book on March 20, 1852, a couple of weeks before the serial ended. Applewood presents the book in a matching edition to the Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the book's first publication.

Author Biography

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, daughter of the Reverend Lyman Beecher of the local Congregational Church. In 1832, the family moved to Cincinnati, where Harriet married Calvin Ellis Stowe, a professor at the seminary, in 1836. The border town of Cincinnati was alive with abolitionist conflict and there Mrs. Stowe took an active part in community life. She came into contact with fugitive slaves, and learned from friends and from personal visits what life was like for the Negro in the South. In 1850, the Fugitive Slave Law was passed, and that same year Harriet’s sister-in-law urged the author to put her feelings about the evils of slavery into words. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was first published serially during 1851-52 in The National Era, and in book form in 1852. In one year more than 300,000 copies of the novel were sold. Mrs. Stowe continued to write, publishing eleven other novels and numerous articles before her death at the age of eighty-five in Hartford, Connecticut.

Ann Douglas teaches English at Columbia University. Her books include Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s and The Feminization of American Culture.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Art of Controversy	7	(28)
Ann Douglas
Suggestions for Further Reading	35	(2)
A Note on the Text	37	(2)
UNCLE TOM'S CABIN	39