Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Stowe’s landmark novel follows the pious, enduring slave Uncle Tom as he is sold away from his family and passed between masters cruel and kind, while the fugitive Eliza makes a desperate flight across the frozen Ohio River to save her child. Unflinching in its depiction of the horrors of American slavery, it stirred the conscience of a nation and is often credited with helping ignite the Civil War—Lincoln reportedly greeted Stowe as ‘the little lady who started this great war.’ Sentimental, powerful, and enormously influential, Uncle Tom’s Cabin remains a pivotal document of American history and one of the most consequential novels ever written.