After Uncle Tom's Cabin

Alone among American novels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin forever changed the social fabric of the United States. It sold more than a million copies, energized abolitionism, and helped to spark the Civil War—but the book also transformed its author. After Uncle Tom’s Cabin follows Harriet Beecher Stowe beyond her monumental first novel, highlighting her interactions with the Black Americans she met, from the lesser-known to such leading figures as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth. Robert S. Levine traces how Stowe came to embrace interracial democracy and how her writing grew to depict radical Black characters. He also explores her years in post–Civil War Florida, where she founded a school she hoped to integrate. Taking Stowe’s most famous novel as the starting point, not the zenith, of a fascinating career, After Uncle Tom’s Cabin sheds new light on one of the great writers and social reformers of the nineteenth century.