Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, first appeared as a serial in the National Era, an antislavery newspaper in Washington D.C. When it was published as a book in 1852, it was an immediate success in the USA. Soon the novel was translated into several languages and became an international bestseller.

The book influenced public views and gave a new impulse to the liberation movement all over the world, including the liberation of Russian serfs. Uncle Tom's Cabin was an attack upon the slave-owners in the South of the USA and upon the institution of slavery as such. According to Abraham Lincoln, the book helped the North to win the Civil War and abolish slavery in the country.

The novel has often been accused of being too sentimental because of its conventional characters and highly emotional scenes. The characters are largely stereotyped: some are real villains (the slave trader Haley), others are suffering innocents (Little Eva), and the main character is an all-forgiving slave. But beyond the conventional characters of sentimental fiction, the reader finds true-to-life insights into plantation life and the motivation of both slave-owners and slaves.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in 1811 into an orthodox Calvinist family: her father and five of her brothers were churchmen educated in Hartford, Connecticut, where she was born. She spent most of her life in the North. Stowe hardly had any direct experience with slavery. But she came from a family strongly opposed to this unjust system. When the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, she became outraged. Her morals and her sense of justice inspired her to write the classic novel that went down in history.

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