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.