Back Three Novels

Harriet Beecher Stowe: Three Novels

Uncle Tom’s Cabin • The Minister’s Wooing • Oldtown Folks

Edited by Kathryn Sklar

“It Uncle Tom’s Cabin has rightly been called “the most influential work of fiction in American history.” — Fayetteville Observer-Times

Overview

Overview

News Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s stark, unheeded “Warning” on slavery
September 15, 2020

Interviews How antislavery writings reconnect us with one of the most crucial themes in American literary history
April 13, 2018

This title is out of stock and a reprint has not yet been scheduled. Sign up here to receive news about forthcoming titles and reprints.

In this Library of America volume are the best and most enduring works of Harriet Beecher Stowe, “the little woman,” as Abraham Lincoln said when he met her in 1861, “who wrote the book that made this great war.” He was referring, with rueful exaggeration, to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which during its first year had sold over 300,000 copies. Contemporary readers can still appreciate the powerful effects of its melodramatic characterizations and its unapologetic sentimentality. They can also recognize in its treatment of racial violence some of the brooding imagination and realism that anticipates Faulkner’s rendering of the same theme. Stowe was charged with exaggerating the evils of slavery, but her stay in Cincinnati, Ohio, where her father (the formidable Lyman Beecher, head of the Lane Theological Seminary) gave her a close look at the miseries of the slave communities across the Ohio River. People in her circle of friends were continually harboring slaves who escaped across the river from Kentucky on the way, they hoped, to Canada.

Two other novels, along with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, show the range and variety of her literary accomplishment. The Minister’s Wooing (1859) is set in Newport, Rhode Island, after the Revolution. It is a romance based in part on the life of Stowe’s sister, and it traces to a happy ending the conflicts in a young woman between adherence to Calvinistic rigor and her expression of preference in the choice of a marital partner. The third novel, Oldtown Folks (1869) confirms Stowe’s genius for the realistic rendering of ordinary experience, her talent for social portraiture with a keen satiric edge, and her subtlety in exploring a wide group of themes, from child-rearing practices and religious controversy to romantic seduction and betrayal. But finally, it is the old town and a way of life that no longer exists that is the true subject of this elegiac novel.

Kathryn Kish Sklar, volume editor, is Distinguished Professor of history at the State University of New York, Binghamton, and co-director, Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender. She is the author of Catharine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy and Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Harriet Beecher Stowe: Three Novels is kept in print by a gift to the Guardians of American Letters Fund in honor of Lise Scott, made by her husband, D. Ronald Daniel.

Or buy from our partners

ISBN: 978-0-94045001-1 1477 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 4 Library of America Series

Subscribers can purchase the slipcased edition by signing in to their accounts.

Related Books

American Speeches: Political Oratory from the Revolution to the Civil War LOA N°166

American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation LOA N°233

Slave Narratives LOA N°114

Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies LOA N°68

Louisa May Alcott: Little Women, Little Men, Jo’s Boys LOA N°156

Library of America

CURATOR

A champion of America’s great writers and timeless works, Library of America guides readers in finding and exploring the exceptional writing that reflects the nation’s history and culture.

Learn More

PUBLISHER

From poetry, novels, and memoirs to journalism, crime writing, and science fiction, the more than 300 volumes published by Library of America are widely recognized as America’s literary canon.

Browse our books Subscribe

NON-PROFIT

With contributions from donors, Library of America preserves and celebrates a vital part of our cultural heritage for generations to come.

Support our mission

Harriet Beecher Stowe: Three Novels

Related Books

Get 10% off your first Library of America purchase.