Uncle Tom’s Cabin is far more than an outdated work of propaganda confounds literary criticism. The novel’s overwhelming-power and persuasion have outlived even the most severe of critics.

“(It) is about slavery but it is about slavery because the fatal weakness of the slave’s condition is the extreme manifestion of the sickness of the general society, a society breaking up into discrete, atomistic individuals where human beings, white or black, can find no secure relation one with another. Mrs. Stowe was more radical than even those in the South who hated her could see. Uncle Tom’s Cabin suggests no less than the simple and terrible possibility that society has no place in it for love…”