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

by David S. Reynolds

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
Sales rank:	719,661
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)

Editorial Reviews

"You can always count on David Reynolds to surprise and delight, and in his latest work, he does not disappoint. This time, he sets his sights on the far-ranging and fascinating impact of Harriet Beecher Stowe's mammoth bestseller, Uncle Tom's Cabin. In Reynolds’s gifted hands, Mightier Than The Sword is nothing less than an intellectual feast. Bravo for yet another superb book."

Jay Winik

"A subtle and splendid history of the novel’s effect on American culture."

Wall Street Journal

"Fascinating…a lively and perceptive cultural history."

Annette Gordon-Reed - The New Yorker

"Bravura work….Reynolds has given us another cultural history of assured mastery, a history that combines deep erudition, lightly worn, with a lively and readable style."

Dallas Morning News

"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

"Insightful,….informative,….rewarding."

New York Times Book Review

"A wonderful history of what may justly be considered America’s national epic."

Joan Hedrick

"Consistently enlightening…Mightier Than the Sword deftly explores the social-intellectual context and personal experience out of which Stowe’s novel evolved into a grand entertainment and a titanic engine of change."

The Boston Globe

A provocative overview of the life and afterlife of one of American literature's most important texts.

Published in 1852,Uncle Tom's Cabinhas a battered reputation, not least in the way the term "Uncle Tom" has become an epithet for somebody who sells out his own race. But Reynolds (English and American Studies/City Univ. of New York; Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson, 2008, etc.) successfully repositions the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) as a major political work, crucial not just to the abolitionist movement, but as kindling for the Civil War and an important inspiration to cultural discussions of race relations through most of the 20th century. In the early chapters, Reynolds examines aspects of Stowe's character that inspired the book: a brand of Christianity that made her sympathetic to abolitionism, an intuitive understanding of adventure stories that captured the public imagination and a sentimental style that prompted readers to rethink their prejudices without feeling provoked. That last element earned Stowe a reputation as a soft antislavery agitator, but there's no questionUncle Tom's Cabinstruck a chord. It sold so well, in fact, that it inspired a whole shelf of anti-Stowe novels; among the most prominent was Thomas Dixon Jr.'s novelThe Clansman, which in turn inspired D.W. Griffith's "adeptly made yet thematically abhorrent filmThe Birth of a Nation." ButUncle Tom's Cabininfluenced the civil-rights movement as well. In the decades after the Civil War, there were few communities that hadn't seen a "Tom play," a stage version of the novel. Reynolds somewhat soft-pedals how these plays perpetuated racist stereotypes, but it's clear that Uncle Tom himself largely retained his status as a symbol of nonviolent resistance, not self-denying passivity. To that end, Stowe's vision endured, as seen in the acts of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists for racial equality. In showing how that sentiment played out not just in the novel and plays but in Shirley Temple films, Mickey Mouse cartoons, magazines ads,Roots and more, Reynolds defends Stowe's influence, even if that influence was frustratingly slow.

A sharp work of cross-disciplinary criticism that gives new power to a diminished novel.

Kirkus Reviews