In 1853 Stowe published another book, A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin: Presenting the Original Facts and Documents Upon Which the Story is Founded. The book documents the interviews, research, and factual events she had used in constructing her narrative.

By then Uncle Tom's Cabin was well on its way to selling a million copies. It was translated into several languages, and was the inspiration for popular songs, poems, and theatrical productions.

Revered and Reviled

Stowe said a complete picture of slavery would be too repugnant for the public. Still, she presented unflinching depictions of interracial sex, hypocrisy within the northern antislavery movement, pro-slavery duplicity preached from Southern pulpits, gender biases endured by white and black women, and even of economic class differences. It made the book both revered and reviled.

For a time, in Kansas, it was a capital offense to own a copy. A decade after its publication, when the Civil War was beginning to rage, President Abraham Lincoln welcomed Stowe to the White House. He reportedly greeted her as "the little woman who wrote the book that made this Great War."

After the war the book's popularity plummeted, according to the U.S. literary critic Edmund Wilson in his 1962 book, Patriotic Gore. "What were the reasons for this eclipse? It is often assumed in the United States that Uncle Tom was a mere propaganda novel which disappeared when it had accomplished its purpose and did not, on its merits, deserve to live. … [B]y the early 1900s, few young people had any at all clear idea of what Uncle Tom's Cabin contained. One could in fact grow up in the United States without ever having seen a copy—up to the time when it was reprinted, in 1948, in the Modern Library Series, it was actually unavailable except at secondhand," Wilson wrote.

Meanwhile, the public persona of Uncle Tom was undergoing a dramatic change. Instead of the symbol of a strong, spiritual man, whose disobedience to his master caused his death, Uncle Tom became a metaphor for a submissive, weak black person who wanted to be white.

By 1919 prominent African-American leaders began using "Uncle Tom" as a pejorative term to stigmatize blacks who betrayed the cause of their race, said Stephen Railton, an English professor at the University of Virginia. Railton maintains an exhaustive online archive dedicated to the book's role in U.S. culture.

By the time the civil rights movement was marching along, the term Uncle Tom easily overshadowed the reality of the book.

In the 1960s and early '70s, Railton said, the classic was seldom ever taught. Literature teachers preferred complex and ironic texts to Stowe's sentimentalism. History instructors were more interested in political and analytical works rather than fiction. Its frequent use of the "N-word" shooed away still others.

Resurgence

Railton said general interest in the book began to resurface on its own merits by the mid 1970s, as a result of burgeoning interest in U.S. women writers by feminist academics.

"The book arrived on the scene once more because there was a political agenda being served. In this case it was emancipating the classroom from the minds and the almost exclusive attention on male writers," Railton said.

Railton points to an active reader-feedback feature of his Uncle Tom's Cabin Web site as his main indicator of the growing interest.

Walter B. Hill, Jr., is a senior archivist at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration who specializes in African-American history. He said that, regardless of the book's popularity, it will always occupy a crucial role in history.

"It is not in any danger of passing out of the American memory," Hill said. "You cannot teach the history of slavery without a reference to Uncle Tom's Cabin. It belongs in any discussion on the civil rights movement, which came about in rejection of laws that discriminated against people of color. Those laws were connected to slavery."

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