Crap Essay, Research Paper

After her short teaching career Harriet

married Calvin Stowe in 1836. In order to

supplement Calvin’s teaching salary, Harriet

wrote short stories dealing with domestic life.

Her royalties helped her hire household help

to assist with raising their seven children.

In 1850 when the south threatened to secede,

Harriet determined that she would write a

serial denouncing the evils of slavery. She

began, expecting to write three to four

installments, but the novel grew to forty

chapters. Meanwhile the nation became

absorbed in the story. Uncle Tom’s Cabin,

published in book form in 1852, was a huge

success.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the first major American novel to feature a Black hero.

With a fine ear for dialogue, deft humor, and dramatic plot, Stowe made her

readers understand that slaves were people who were being made to suffer

cruelly. Stowe’s novel also insisted that slavery undermined the moral sensibility

of whites who tolerated or profited from it. Stowe wrote of the evils of slavery

so that others could be free. Hers was one of the most effective pieces of

reform literature ever published.

Later her Pink and White Tyranny attacked the idea that women should be

ornamental and helpless. She wrote many subsequent novels but none of her

later works could approach the literary merit or the social impact of Uncle

Tom’s Cabin.