The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin (The Annotated Books)

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Editor), Hollis Robbins (Editor)

$39.95

Publication Date: November 17th, 2006

Publisher:

W. W. Norton & Company

ISBN:

9780393059465

Pages:

528

Description

Henry Louis Gates Jr. redefines Uncle Tom's Cabin with this seminal interpretation of the great American novel.

Declared worthless and dehumanizing by James Baldwin in 1949, Uncle Tom's Cabin has lacked literary credibility for fifty years. Now, in a ringing refutation of Baldwin, Henry Louis Gates Jr. demonstrates the literary transcendence of Harriet Beecher Stowe's masterpiece. Uncle Tom's Cabin, first published in 1852, galvanized the American public as no other work of fiction has ever done. The editors animate pre-Civil War life with rich insights into the lives of slaves, abolitionists, and the American reading public. Examining the lingering effects of the novel, they provide new insights into emerging race-relation, women's, gay, and gender issues. With reproductions of rare prints, posters, and photographs, this book is also one of the most thorough anthologies of Uncle Tom images up to the present day.

About the Author

Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in 1811 in Litchfield, Connecticut, where her father, Lyman Beecher, was an up-and-coming Presbyterian minister. She attended Hartford Female Seminary, which was founded by her older sister Catharine, a leader in the women’s education movement. Among her other notable siblings were Henry Ward Beecher, an influential clergyman and social reformer, and the suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker. In 1836 she married the biblical scholar Calvin Stowe, with whom she had seven children. Stowe is best known for her 1852 antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life Among the Lowly, which became an international bestseller. She went on to write more than thirty books of fiction and nonfiction, as well as stories, essays, and poems. Stowe died in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1896.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Ph.D.Cambridge), is Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and American Research, Harvard University. He is the author of Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513–2008; Black in Latin America; Tradition and the Black Atlantic: Critical Theory in the African Diaspora; Faces of America; Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self; The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Criticism; Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars; Colored People: A Memoir; The Future of Race with Cornel West; Wonders of the African World; Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man; and The Trials of Phillis Wheatley. His is also the writer, producer, and narrator of PBS documentaries Finding Your Roots; Black in Latin America; Faces of America; African American Lives 1 and 2; Looking for Lincoln; America Beyond the Color Line; and Wonders of the African World. He is the editor of African American National Biography with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, and The Dictionary of African Biography with Anthony Appiah; Encyclopedia Africana with Anthony Appiah; and The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts, as well as editor-in-chief of TheRoot.com.