Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America

“Fascinating . . . a lively and perceptive cultural history.” —Annette Gordon-Reed, The New Yorker

In this wide-ranging, brilliantly researched work, David S. Reynolds traces the factors that made Uncle Tom’s Cabin the most influential novel ever written by an American. Upon its 1852 publication, the novel’s vivid depiction of slavery polarized its American readership, ultimately widening the rift that led to the Civil War. Reynolds also charts the novel’s afterlife—including its adaptation into plays, films, and consumer goods—revealing its lasting impact on American entertainment, advertising, and race relations.

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Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America

“Fascinating . . . a lively and perceptive cultural history.” —Annette Gordon-Reed, The New Yorker

In this wide-ranging, brilliantly researched work, David S. Reynolds traces the factors that made Uncle Tom’s Cabin the most influential novel ever written by an American. Upon its 1852 publication, the novel’s vivid depiction of slavery polarized its American readership, ultimately widening the rift that led to the Civil War. Reynolds also charts the novel’s afterlife—including its adaptation into plays, films, and consumer goods—revealing its lasting impact on American entertainment, advertising, and race relations.

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Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America

Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America

by David S. Reynolds
Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America

Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America

by David S. Reynolds

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Overview

“Fascinating . . . a lively and perceptive cultural history.” —Annette Gordon-Reed, The New Yorker

In this wide-ranging, brilliantly researched work, David S. Reynolds traces the factors that made Uncle Tom’s Cabin the most influential novel ever written by an American. Upon its 1852 publication, the novel’s vivid depiction of slavery polarized its American readership, ultimately widening the rift that led to the Civil War. Reynolds also charts the novel’s afterlife—including its adaptation into plays, films, and consumer goods—revealing its lasting impact on American entertainment, advertising, and race relations.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780393082340
Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date: 06/11/2012
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 368
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

David S. Reynolds is Distinguished Professor of English and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His books include Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography; John Brown, Abolitionist; Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville; Mightier Than the Sword: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Battle for America; Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson; Walt Whitman; George Lippard; and Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America. Reynolds is the editor or coeditor of seven books, including Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: The 150th Anniversary Edition, A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: The Splendid Edition, and George Lippard’s The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall. He is the winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Christian Gauss Award, the Ambassador Book Award, the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Prize and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review.

What People are Saying About This

Jay Winik

"You can always count on David Reynolds to surprise and delight…Mightier than the Sword is nothing less than an intellectual feast. Bravo for yet another superb book." --(Jay Winik, author of April 1865 and The Great Upheaval)

Annette Gordon-Reed

Fascinating…a lively and perceptive cultural history.— The New Yorker

Debby Applegate

"Deeply researched and compulsively readable…Both the definitive account of the strange but true career of Uncle Tom's Cabin and a sweeping two-hundred year history of race in America." --(Debby Applegate, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher)


Joan Hedrick

"A wonderful history of what may justly be considered America's national epic." --(Joan Hedrick, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life)


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