Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom's Cabin opens with a Kentucky farmer named Arthur Shelby facing the loss of his farm because of debts. Even though he and his wife, Emily Shelby, believe that they have a benevolent relationship with their slaves, Shelby decides to raise the needed funds by selling two of them-Uncle Tom, a middle-aged man with a wife and children, and Harry, the son of Emily Shelby's maid Eliza-to a slave trader. Emily Shelby hates the idea of doing this because she had promised her maid that her child would never be sold; Emily's son, George Shelby, hates to see Tom go because he sees the old man as his friend and mentor.When Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in 1852, it became an international blockbuster, selling more than 300,000 copies in the United States alone in its first year. Progressive for her time, Harriet Beecher Stowe was one of the earliest writers to offer a shockingly realistic depiction of slavery. Her stirring indictment and portrait of human dignity in the most inhumane circumstances enlightened hundreds of thousands of people by revealing the human costs of slavery, which had until then been cloaked and justified by the racist misperceptions of the time.

By calling attention to the issue of slavery, it has become part of our country's literary and historical heritage.

Uncle Tom's Cabin brought the evils of slavery to the consciences and hearts of the American people by its moving portrayal of slave experience. Harriet Beecher Stowe shows us in scenes of great dramatic power the human effects of an economic system in which slaves were property: the break up of families, the struggles for freedom, the horrors of plantation labor. She brings into fiction the different voices of the emerging American nation, the Southern slave-owning classes, Northern abolitionists, children, the sorrow songs and dialect of slaves, as well the language of political debate and religious zeal. The novel was, and is, controversial, abrasive in its demand for change, yet also brilliant in the deployment of dialogue, with great comic skill and a power of pathos that made it a runaway bestseller in its time that continues to move us today.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1811, the seventh child of a well-known Congregational minister, Lyman Beecher. The family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where she met and married Calvin Stowe, a professor of Theology in 1836. Living just across the river Ohio from the slaveholding state of Kentucky and becoming aware of the plight of escaping slaves led her to write Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in book form in 1852. She wrote the novel amid the difficulties of bringing up a family of six children. The runaway success of Uncle Tom's Cabin made its author a well-known public figure. Stowe died in 1896.

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Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) published her first book, The Mayflower, in 1843. In 1852 she published her bestselling classic, Uncle Toma (TM)s Cabin, the first novel to criticize the institution of slavery. She lectured and wrote for twenty-five years.

Richard Allen is professor and chair of cinema studies at New York University. He is the author of numerous essays on Hitchcock, coeditor of two anthologies, "Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays" and "Hitchcock: Past and Future," and with Sidney Gottlieb he edits the "Hitchcock Annual" for Wallflower Press.