Harriet Beecher Stowe Books

If you're teaching or studying black history, the Inkling ebook edition of A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (ISBN: B000BGQ9E4) is a great bargain. You get an exact facsimile of the classic 1853 edition with the original small type enlarged to fit 8.5x11 inch pages for easier reading and printing.

Best of all, despite Amazon's boilerplate remarks about "most publishers do not allow e-books to be printed" none of the restrictive digital rights management is turned on. You can print and copy all the pages you like.

A lot of people make fun of Uncle Tom's Cabin, make fun of it's mid-nineenth century literary style and neglecting the enormous impact it has had. Here's what George Orwell, the author of two literary classics, Animal Farm and 1984, said about Uncle Tom's Cabin:

"A type of book which we hardly seem to produce in these days, but which flowered with great richness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is what Chesterton called the "good bad book": that is, the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished....

Perhaps the supreme example of the "good bad" book is Uncle Tom's Cabin. It is an unintentionally ludicrous book, full of preposterous melodramatic incidents; it is also deeply moving and essentially true; it is hard to say which quality outweighs the other. But Uncle Tom's Cabin, after all, is trying to be serious and to deal with the real world.... And by the same token I would back Uncle Tom's Cabin to outlive the complete works of Virginia Woolf or George Moore, though I know of no strictly literary test which would show where the superiority lies."

Upon publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, HB Stowe was attacked immediately by pro-slavery writers. Her work was dismissed as fiction, an abolitionist's distorted view, and totally representing slavery in the South. Mrs. Stowe responded by collecting and expanding her factual documentation. She started to write a 25-page pamphlet, to be added as an appendix to the next edition of Cabin. But the work consumed her, as she confronted the stories of many escaped slaves, newspaper articles, court testimony, and even the text of state laws. The defense project grew to over 500 pages, and is a major work in its own right.

Frederick Douglas called it a major contribution to the war against slaveholders: "...for the 'Key' not only proves the correctness of every essential part of Uncle Tom's Cabin, but proves more and worse things against themurderous system than are alleged in that great book."

Historians and history teachers must have this book, as a reference and as an experience. Anyone who strives to understand the burning issues that ignited the War between the States needs this book. I recommend it.

My reason for reading this book was to understand why some Blacks today are called 'Uncle Toms'. Once I began the book, I realized that I would have to stop looking at the book frrom the perspective of a Black woman in the year 2001. That the author was not a slave or a Black is very obvious, and her own misconceptions about Blacks are very disturbing. But she is, after all, writing from her the only point of view she knew. I found the book to be very engrossing, easy to read and also interesting enough to keep me from flipping to the end.

"Uncle Tom's Cabin was a very good book. I wouldn't encourage younger people like 4th and 5th graders to read it, but I think everyone needs to read it by the time they graduate from school."

Uncle Tom's Cabin was mentioned so often in various Civil War era history books I've been reading that I'd decided to order it from Amazon! I was very surprised at how good it was, a page-turner and a tear jerker. I could see the historical importance of it and said that to me anyway, what Common Sense was to the Revolutionary War; Uncle Tom's Cabin was to the Civil War. It brought something important into the homes of people who had their own problems and thought little about slavery and awakened them. It is an easy read even by modern standards and I recommend it to everyone. Moviemaniac

Uncle Tom's Cabin, which is set between 1840 and 1850, is a novel that brought the cruelties of slavery into American homes. It unveils how slaves, like Uncle Tom and Eliza, were treated by slave owners, like Simon Legree. Throughout the novel there's a strong contrast between good and evil, which is personified by the different slave owners. First, Tom and Eliza serve a Christian family. Tom embraces Christianity through his compassion for others, honesty, evangelism, humbleness and his obedience without compromising his beliefs. Eliza, a beautiful Christian mulatto, shows her courage and love for her son. This love becomes strongest when she escapes with him to Canada after he's sold to pay debts. In the meantime, Tom is sold to Simon Legree. Simon displays evilness in his strength, greed and brutality. After Tom's friend escapes the plantation, Tom is blamed. The plot thickens when in Eliza's journey to Canada, she literally skates over thin ice as her son's master is close behind. Overall, the book was well written and the introduction omitted need for further research. Ms. Stowe is outstanding at exposing the severity of the slavery atmosphere without today's Hollywood gore. The historical accuracy is shown throughout the novel as The Fugitive Slave Law is mentioned and Harriet provides parallels between actual people and the story's characters. However, as the introduction states, Stowe claims both that slavery is evil for exaggerating differences between races and denying similarities. Overall Stowe is noteworthy and her book should be read because it influenced attitudes towards slavery, and embeds historical events interestingly.

This book touched my heart. I loved it! Uncle Tom was such a strong character. After all he went through, he managed to keep his faith and
know that God had bigger plans for him. I give this book my highest score and wish that I could give it more. It's definitely one of the best books I've ever read.

I grabbed this book, figuring I would try some of the classics. Figuiring, what would be better than the book that assisted in breaking our country (US) in two.

This classic was simply put amazing and well worth the hype. Mrs Stowe has created great characters in this novel and even though most readers know she was an abolitionist she did a very good job at being unbiased, showing both sides as equal as possible, pro-south, pro abolitionist and those people in between. The good and bad southerners and the good and bad Northerners.

I am shocked that only one other person has reviewed this timeless book. PLease read it, review it and tell your friends. THis book is a jewel.

Each chapter has a number of words or phrases, usually obscure, noted with an asterisk. Unfortunately there are no footnotes or explanations provided, so the presence of the asterisks is a mystery.

It will be found shocking to many African Americans (and educational for many Caucasians) to discover that Uncle Tom was the HERO of this classic novel, and not a "weakling" by any stretch of the imagination. "Uncle Tom", or its shorter form "Tom", has become a slanderous term within the African American community and implies a weak and Caucasian-controlled person, when in actuality Uncle Tom was a powerfully moral man who was willing to die for his convictions rather than succumb to the will of his worst oppressors. In fact, this book was credited by Abraham Lincoln himself as the catalyst that won his election on the abolition of slavery platform, and the resulting Civil War that followed. "Uncle Tom" became a negative slander one hundred years later only after Malcolm-X and the Black Muslims used it to slander Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who exemplified similar characteristics of strength and courage--from a similarly peaceful perspective--in his approach to the Civil Rights issue. As with the fictitious character Tom, Dr. King also died for his convictions without raising a hand against his oppressors. I highly recommend this book to people of all colors and races because of the lessons of self-sacrifice and courage it contains. Caucasian readers will hopefully learn of the pain and suffering of the slaves and gain a deeper compassion for its lingering legacy today. However, I especially recommend Uncle Tom's Cabin to African Americans, for contained in its pages are stories of love, compassion and courage--by both black & white--that will offset the painful legacy of that period caused by the suffering of so many. May the ignorance of the "Uncle Tom" slander be eradicated from their minds as they read of the courage of this fictitious character--who reminded others of Dr. King himself--and the other characters whose struggles and triumphs are contained in its pages also. I also recommend the books: No Apology Necessary, by Earl Carter, Let's Get to Know Each Other, by Tony Evans, and my own book, which is-- White Man in a Black Man's World (tm), by Richard Vermillion.

A central text in American Literature and History, January 7, 2005
Reviewer: Tony Thomas (North Miami, FL USA) - See all my reviews
Uncle Tom is probably the most important single book written in the United States of America. No one is really familiar with American culture, literature, relgion, and history if she or he has not read Uncle Tom.

To understand this book, I would urge people to consult Eric J. Sundquist's book New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin (The American Novel) and Jane Tompkin's Sensational Designs. The 19th Century world and reader that Stowe aimed at read and understood things so differently, that you will miss much without knowing how to look at this book the way Stowe wrote to them and the way they read.

This book has a broad purpose: literary to decide what is wrong with the entire world and present an answer. If you follow the sweep of the book you will find Stowe takes on everything from whether the issues of the 1848 revolutions can be resolved on the side of Democracy, to the question of marital relations amogn the free and the white. The issue of slavery is not the book's only focus. It is, in fact, the solution.

Stowe's real thesis here is that American Chattel slavery is the number one evil in the world, that this evil corrupts every institution in society North and South and corrupts far beyond the borders of the United States, and that no compromise with it or avoidance of it is possible.

To Stowe, slavery is an abomination not just because of the cruelty, savagery, exploitation, and degradation involved, but above all, it is an abomination against God, the most unChrist-like behavior possible.

Thus the relgious solution she offers is to become more Christlike in your opposition to slavery and to finally undergrow the Christic experience of dying for your sins and being reborn in Jesus Christ. That's right, in Stowe's time evangelical Christianity, rather than being a fob for right-wing politics, was practiced by some of the militant and serious opponents of slavery.

Stowe creates figures that are Christlike who like Christ die rather than yield to sin and influence the others in their faith. The supreme figure is of course Uncle Tom. Uncle Tom, as a a pejorative, comes not from this novel, but from the Tom shows that blossomed in the late 19th century which were a presentation of a mock version of this story with racist minstrel like charicatures of the African American characters.

In this book, Uncle Tom is a physically majestic, heroic, dignified person, whose faith and dignity are never corrupted, whose death is shown as a parallel to that of Christ in the resurrection of the souls of all around him required to eliminate Slavery. If he is passive, never disobeys his masters, and seems to have not much of a material interest of his own in life, it is because to Stowe this a reflection of his Christic nature.

No doubt at best Stowe sees him as a "noble savage" at Best. There is no doubt if one reads this book and even more clearly STowe's Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin which provided documentation for this book's depiction of slavery, that it is clear that Stowe did not believe African Americans were equal to whites. Her then-current immigrationist views are expressed in the way the one intelligent independently acting Black couple presented here leave the US for Canada once they escape slavery.

Yet, this book accomplished the purpose it had. It galvanized millions of Americans and more millions around the world to dramatically oppose slavery. Uncle Tom was one of the first true international best sellers. In a smaller country, where literacy was lower, and when many people bought books through private libraries where families shared books and the book was often read to family gatherings rather than by one person, Uncle Tom sold two hundred thousand copies in its first year and sold a million copies between its publication and the civil war.

Stowe was honest in her afterward and in other writings to say that her description of slavery in Uncle Tom is much prettier and more nicer than slavery was. She believed an accurate depiction of slavery--Stowe had lived in Cincinatti on the board with slaving Kentucky and traveled through the South--would be so revolting that her target audience of Northern whites would not read this book.

Her book launched a torrent of responses from white southerners as could be expected. However, the popularity of her book encouraged white authors, but especially Black authors to write antislavery books that responded to Stowe. Some of the foundations of Black American literature by authors like Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Harriet Jacobs, and Martin Delany are essentially response to Uncle Tom.

Perhaps the most dramatic is Delany's Blake or the Huts of America whose character is a double to Uncle Tom. However, Delany's hero does not submit to being sold "down the river." He instead runs away and travels throughout the US following the same course as the travels in Uncle Tom showing how slave conditions are so much worse than Stowe showed. Finished with that business, Blake leaves the United States for Cuba where he becomes part of a group of Afro-Cubans unwilling to suffer like Christ and Uncle Tom. Like the current leaders of Cuba, they start to organize an international revolution of Slaves and the oppressed!

Hi friends and neighbors,

I've recently had the most delightful pleasure of reading one of the best books ever -- Uncle Tom's Cabin: or, Life among the Lowly by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Recently I was in need of trying to understand a phrase I'd been hearing. My research on the Internet kept bringing me to a term "an Uncle Tom" which was always spoken with utter contempt and the alluded-to concept of a traitor. I was not satisfied with what I was finding and my dictionary afforded no relief.

So I turned to the public library and checked out a copy of the book Uncle Tom's Cabin: or, Life among the Lowly. The library had numerous copies and I chose one with the original text and without the usual literary critic's additive and alterative remarks.

Wow, what a treasure!

This Tom character was not in the least what others had alluded to. I can only assume that those who spoke derisively about dear Tom had not actually read the book themselves but merely seen or heard some altered rendition of it which was misunderstood by the listener or the teller or both.

I found Harriet Beecher Stowe to be an excellent author, carefully weaving her sentiments and historical matters into the various characters of her adventurous novel. As was probably the only way a woman could be heard broadly in the mid 1800s, she spoke passionately through her characters. I'm not surprised that her novel was a hit in its day, exposing to daylight the evils and regrets of a system that was entirely accepted and protected by law, along with the poignant moments of love and caring that existed amongst those same evils.

The way Mrs. Stowe writes, it is easy to see and understand all the many aspects of that portion of American history devoted to the ownership of other humans as chattel. Also a delight was reading all the varied viewpoints that people held (pro and con) of such a system and even the enormous magnitude of what it would take to overcome that stubborn system. What foresight!

If you've never read this book and would like a good read (keep the tissues handy because you'll need them), I highly recommend you read this book.

What a delightful story it is!

I am a living decendent of Josiah Henson. He led a terriilbe but fullfilling life.

I am a decendent of Josiah Henson. I attended a family reunion in Ont. Canada in August 1999. Any decendent having information on Josiah Henson or interested and attending the next family reunion please contact me at my e-mail address.

josiah henson was used as a model for harriett beecher stowe's uncle tom. however he was very different from uncle tom. he was very proud, ambitious, driven by his convictions, and was very creative in efforts to improve himself, his family, and the lot of escaped slave families in canada. he wrestled with his strong christian faith, his pride, and his rather dishonest masters. but he persevered in inspiring fashion. among his achievements were cooperative effort to establish a manual labor school, a sawmill, learning to read from his oldest son, becoming an accomplished methodist preacher, and marketing black walnut lumber in boston and england. the bishop of canterbury asked him which university he had attended, and josiah henson replied "the university of adversity." his children must have been one of his best endeavors, and i suspect that this is reflected in the title of the book.

For those interested in finding out the real truth about polygamy in early Mormonism this book is wonderful. I have read many, many books on the subject and I put this first-hand account at the top of the list.

This book is written by an educated woman who lived in polygamy in the mid 1800s in Utah. Although she was a strong Mormon, she felt that God would not make women live under such a terrible "principle", as polygamy was referred to. Because of her husband's work for the Mormon church, she was in the highest circles of the Mormon elite which makes her writing very compelling reading. She was very brave to write this book and suffered the consequences.

Once in a long while you will find a book so compelling you can not lay it down and this is such a book! I felt like I was pulled into the story and suffered with Fanny Stenhouse as she fought the good fight against the Mormon Church and her enemies who wanted to shut her up.. This was not an off shoot of the Mormon Church but the original Church and it is a chilling example of an organization gone astray and exploiting women to satisfy men's lust. She quotes Brigham Young and how he received from heaven the exact dogma of plural marriage and as she says so well... "with bad grammar and all." It is a must read for those who enjoy history and want light shed on the issue of plural marriage and of women really felt of this practice, no matter how hard the church will try to define it. You will never forget this story and never defend this church with it's brutal and nasty past. Thank God Fannie did get out of Mormonism, but at a great risk to her life and limb.

I am glad I took the advice of other customers and purchased the audio tape rather than CD version of this classic. Perfectly narrated...this novel must have rocked and shocked the United States. It is a literary wonder.

The unabridged audio of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is excellent in every way. This is a classic that should never be forgotten , and has more theology in it that most theology books. It also fairly portrays slavery and the arguments for and against. The real thing that makes this book so outstanding as in many audio editions, is the narrator, Buck Schinder. I don't believe I have ever heard a better reader who could make every character come alive with the correct personality. His mastery of the Negro dialect is amazing. This book is heartwarming as well as heartbreaking, and is full of truths, as Harriet Beecher Stowe did much research and many interviews with escaped slaves while writing it. I highly recommend it.

Uncle Tom is probably the most important single book written in the United States of America. No one is really familiar with American culture, literature, relgion, and history if she or he has not read Uncle Tom.

To understand this book, I would urge people to consult Eric J. Sundquist's book New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin (The American Novel) and Jane Tompkin's Sensational Designs. The 19th Century world and reader that Stowe aimed at read and understood things so differently, that you will miss much without knowing how to look at this book the way Stowe wrote to them and the way they read.

This book has a broad purpose: literary to decide what is wrong with the entire world and present an answer. If you follow the sweep of the book you will find Stowe takes on everything from whether the issues of the 1848 revolutions can be resolved on the side of Democracy, to the question of marital relations amogn the free and the white. The issue of slavery is not the book's only focus. It is, in fact, the solution.

Stowe's real thesis here is that American Chattel slavery is the number one evil in the world, that this evil corrupts every institution in society North and South and corrupts far beyond the borders of the United States, and that no compromise with it or avoidance of it is possible.

To Stowe, slavery is an abomination not just because of the cruelty, savagery, exploitation, and degradation involved, but above all, it is an abomination against God, the most unChrist-like behavior possible.

Thus the relgious solution she offers is to become more Christlike in your opposition to slavery and to finally undergrow the Christic experience of dying for your sins and being reborn in Jesus Christ. That's right, in Stowe's time evangelical Christianity, rather than being a fob for right-wing politics, was practiced by some of the militant and serious opponents of slavery.

Stowe creates figures that are Christlike who like Christ die rather than yield to sin and influence the others in their faith. The supreme figure is of course Uncle Tom. Uncle Tom, as a a pejorative, comes not from this novel, but from the Tom shows that blossomed in the late 19th century which were a presentation of a mock version of this story with racist minstrel like charicatures of the African American characters.

In this book, Uncle Tom is a physically majestic, heroic, dignified person, whose faith and dignity are never corrupted, whose death is shown as a parallel to that of Christ in the resurrection of the souls of all around him required to eliminate Slavery. If he is passive, never disobeys his masters, and seems to have not much of a material interest of his own in life, it is because to Stowe this a reflection of his Christic nature.

No doubt at best Stowe sees him as a "noble savage" at Best. There is no doubt if one reads this book and even more clearly STowe's Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin which provided documentation for this book's depiction of slavery, that it is clear that Stowe did not believe African Americans were equal to whites. Her then-current immigrationist views are expressed in the way the one intelligent independently acting Black couple presented here leave the US for Canada once they escape slavery.

Yet, this book accomplished the purpose it had. It galvanized millions of Americans and more millions around the world to dramatically oppose slavery. Uncle Tom was one of the first true international best sellers. In a smaller country, where literacy was lower, and when many people bought books through private libraries where families shared books and the book was often read to family gatherings rather than by one person, Uncle Tom sold two hundred thousand copies in its first year and sold a million copies between its publication and the civil war.

Stowe was honest in her afterward and in other writings to say that her description of slavery in Uncle Tom is much prettier and more nicer than slavery was. She believed an accurate depiction of slavery--Stowe had lived in Cincinatti on the board with slaving Kentucky and traveled through the South--would be so revolting that her target audience of Northern whites would not read this book.

Her book launched a torrent of responses from white southerners as could be expected. However, the popularity of her book encouraged white authors, but especially Black authors to write antislavery books that responded to Stowe. Some of the foundations of Black American literature by authors like Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Harriet Jacobs, and Martin Delany are essentially response to Uncle Tom.

Perhaps the most dramatic is Delany's Blake or the Huts of America whose character is a double to Uncle Tom. However, Delany's hero does not submit to being sold "down the river." He instead runs away and travels throughout the US following the same course as the travels in Uncle Tom showing how slave conditions are so much worse than Stowe showed. Finished with that business, Blake leaves the United States for Cuba where he becomes part of a group of Afro-Cubans unwilling to suffer like Christ and Uncle Tom. Like the current leaders of Cuba, they start to organize an international revolution of Slaves and the oppressed!

John R. Adams's "Harriet Beecher Stowe: Updated Edition," in the Twayne's United States Authors Series is a short and succinct biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe from A to Z in less than 131 pages. No small task considering her influence on 19th century America.

Adam's book includes a chronology of events that serves as an excellent outline of the major events in Stowe's life. The book also includes a section on research notes, a selected bibliography and it includes a detailed index.

The book in organized by major life periods, such as her moving to Cincinnati and her publication of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." The book will serve those who require a significant understanding of Stowe without spending a lot of time reading larger biographies of her life. Therefore, it can be describe as an excellent introductory text. Well suitable for those studying American Civil War history, American literature, American religious history or women's history.

John R. Adams is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the University of Southern California.

John R. Adams's "Harriet Beecher Stowe: Updated Edition," in the Twayne's United States Authors Series is a short and succinct biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe from A to Z in less than 131 pages. No small task considering her influence on 19th century America.

Adam's book includes a chronology of events that serves as an excellent outline of the major events in Stowe's life. The book also includes a section on research notes, a selected bibliography and it includes a detailed index.

The book in organized by major life periods, such as her moving to Cincinnati and her publication of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." The book will serve those who require a significant understanding of Stowe without spending a lot of time reading larger biographies of her life. Therefore, it can be describe as an excellent introductory text. Well suitable for those studying American Civil War history, American literature, American religious history or women's history.

While John R. Adams is not an historian, he has clearly contributed to our understanding of Harriet Beecher Stowe and her writings. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the University of Southern California.

Every American should read this book. It came to me as a gift, and, to be frank, I took it up reluctantly. I mean, who wants to read about a sanctimonious busybody, once influential, now largely forgotten but for her famous book fluttered before your face in junior high? Within pages, that question became its opposite: who doesn't? Having picked the book up, I couldn't put it down. The story is utterly absorbing, filled with passion, filled with pathos - religious fervor, Civil War, its prelude, its aftermath, the Gilded Age. It is the story of public triumph - that famous book again, plus many others - and private grief - the drowning of a beloved son, the disappearance of another in San Francisco, pursued by demons, the trials of a famous brother. The writing is brilliant, even breathtaking, like some wild Disney ride, but that is not what distinguishes the book. What does is the organization of voices, events, incidents, themes. All are woven into a seamless tapestry made up of many, many intensely colored threads. The rush of narative delights, but ultimately it is the intricate pattern that holds your attention. A perfect giift for anyone interested in 19 c. America.

PS Ignore that foolish review in PW.

"I love everybody," Harriet Beecher Stowe once told an acquaintance. Of course, this wasn't entirely true, for there were certainly those she didn't like at all. But love was surely a motivating force in her life. "She was impelled by love," wrote her son Charles, "and did what she did, and wrote what she did, under the impulse of love."
And thus we have Loves of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the title of Phillip McFarland's excellent new biography. McFarland's book focuses on those Mrs. Stowe loved most: her husband, Calvin Stowe; her father, Lyman Beecher; and her famous brother, Henry Ward Beecher. There were many others she loved, of course, including her children, her other siblings, and her many friends. But by focusing on these three men, McFarland enables us, in a highly original way, to understand Mrs. Stowe and what drove her.
She wrote the most important, influential book of the 19th century -- Uncle Tom's Cabin. She also penned several other novels and countless articles in magazines and newspapers. That she managed to write much of this while keeping house and raising little ones is nothing short of remarkable. But then, as one learns from reading this book, Harriet Beecher Stowe was a remarkable woman.
Phillip McFarland is one of the premier biographers in the U.S. today. His previous biographies on Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow were critically acclaimed, though they did not make any best-seller lists. Loves of Harriet Beecher Stowe adds to his reputation. McFarland writes beautiful prose, and he has an exceptional ability to get inside his subject. Read this book, and you will come to know Harriet Beecher Stowe intimately.

What can I say..Uncle Tom's Cabin is the most important and influential book ever written by an American. It should be a part of every serious reader's library.

A classic book that changed America. The context is dated but this book was a long overdue addition to my collection.

We just couldn't resist writing a review for Harriet, even if she won't be able to read it. This is a quaint and ghostly whodunnit--no chainsaws or flesh-eaters here. (Well, not really.) We think it's super! Worth five stars.