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“Uncle Tom’s Cabin is an anti-slavery activist novel, written in the run-up to the Civil War. Stowe tried to mediate the widening schism between North and South, but the book had the opposite effect – prodding north and south to greater extremes of rage. With some justice, Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been called a cause of the Civil War. When President Abraham Lincoln met the author at the White House, he greeted her as “the little lady that started the big war.” Read more...
Lots of people recognise that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an absolute turning point in getting people to acknowledge that black people were human beings like anyone else.
Look at what novels such as The Jungle and On the Beach and Uncle Tom’s Cabin and To Kill a Mockingbird and New York 2140 have done. That have all, in their own ways, changed the world, and changed the literary climate. Novels have heft. Political and scientific op-eds lead only to media distractions and political and scientific squabbles.
A book I didn’t include—Uncle Tom’s Cabin—was designed to change the world. But very few, actually, are written with that particular objective in mind.
(Progress and Poverty was) published in 1888, it ranks with Uncle Tom’s Cabin as one of the most influential political novels of the 19th century.
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