Uncle Tom's Cabin

The novel that moved a nation toward war by making readers feel, in their own parlors, the cruelty they had managed not to see. Stowe wrote politics as fiction and sold it in numbers without precedent, turning hundreds of thousands of ordinary readers into abolitionists. The book has its flaws and its dated turns, but its power is a fact of history: a story did what arguments could not, and the country was never able to look away again.

The New England writer whose novel did what tracts and speeches could not: it made a nation feel the cruelty of slavery in its own parlors. Uncle Tom's Cabin sold in numbers without precedent and turned readers into abolitionists by the hundreds of thousands. The story that Lincoln greeted her as the little lady who made this great war is probably apocryphal. That people believed it, and still do, measures the book's force.