Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

Christopher Diller (Berry College)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.2: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Nineteenth Century, 1783-1900.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1852

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

Published as a book on March 10, 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin catapulted her almost overnight from a writer of New England folkways to a national and international celebrity. Selling an unprecedented 300,000 copies within a year in the United States, the novel was even more popular in Great Britain, and it was immediately translated into French, Spanish, German, Dutch, and some dozen other languages. Further, more people probably had the novel read to them aloud, or saw it performed as a stage show than actually purchased a copy, and the lack of international copyright agreements ensured that an untold number of copies were simply pirated, printed, sold, and circulated without Stowe …

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2685 words

Citation: Diller, Christopher. "Uncle Tom's Cabin". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 July 2011 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8533, accessed 23 November 2024.]

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