Who here has read _Uncle Tom's Cabin_?

[Critters2]

This book is blowing me away. I can see why Lincoln called Stowe "the little lady who wrote the book that started this war".

[darkstar]

1. Yep, I've read it.

Many memorable sections, largely b/c they are so difficult to take. How far into it are you?

[Critters2]

2. Tom has just been sold to Simon Legree,

which is farily far into the book. From everything I've ever heard about it, Legree is the worst character in the book, but even the best whites come off looking pretty bad...well, not the Quakers, but pretty much everyone else.

What strikes me is that even the "good whites" accept slavery as just the way things are. Most disturbing.

[darkstar]

3. Yeah...

disturbing is right. And Tom tried so hard not to rock the boat. Soul crushing.

[Critters2]

4. I gotta go finish it

Discussing it at book club tomorrow night.

Soul crushing is right.

[cmkramer]

16. I read it a few years ago

It was always one of those "I need to read this book someday" things for me, but I never got around to it until fairly recently.

The thing I remembered most is that for some reason all the slaves who had some brains and moxie and ambition were pretty much white. Obviously, that wasn't true in real life, But I'm guessing that was the feeling back then.

Actually, I think by today's standards this would be a pretty racist book.

[snailly]

5. Just out of curiousity

How old are you? No offense meant.

[Critters2]

6. 40's. And yes, I should've read it before this.

But, somehow, I never did. Actually, I've committed myself to reading lots of classic I missed somehow. This one's for a book group, but I'm going to read more classics, regardless of what the group decides. Next: Moby Dick.

[darkstar]

7. I think the poster probably meant it was freqently assigned

in earlier years, as was Moby Dick, say to kids in HS in the 50s and 60s. And if it makes you feel any better, I didn't read either until my 40s...when I was working on English PhD....

:hi:

[Critters2]

8. I read some classics. Was just thinking last night that it reminds me

of Huck Finn, which I read in jr. high. And I was a history major, so lots of important lit in college. But this one just never showed up on any reading lists.

[mzteris]

13. not if you lived in the South.

I've never read it. Although I did read another book that was totally awesome:

Six Women's Slave Narratives (Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers)

Book Description
Written by six black women, these stories embody most of the predominant themes and narrative forms found in African-American women's autobiographies from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (1831), the first female slave narrative from the Americas, recounts one woman's suffering and courage in the pursuit of freedom. The Story of Mattie J. Jackson (1866) not only tells of a quest for personal freedom, but also concludes with a family reunion in the North after the Civil War. The Memoir of Old Elizabeth, a Coloured Woman (1863) blends the traditions of the slave narrative and the spiritual autobiography together in a tale of a ninety-seven-year-old ex-slave who becomes a preacher. Lucy A. Delaney's From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom (c. 1891) records a former slave's life achievements in the quarter-century following the end of the Civil War. Kate Drumgoold, in A Slave Girl's Story, and Annie L. Burton, in Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days, also describe their successes in the postwar North while eulogizing black motherhood in the antebellum South. Each of these stories reveals the black woman's ability to recover in past oppression the hope for a better day.

http://www.amazon.com/Narratives-Schomburg-Library-Nineteenth-Century/dp/0195060830



At any rate, I should put Uncle Tom's cabin on my "to read" list.

[trackfan]

15. I was about 40 when I read it.

They never assigned it to us in school.

[ashling]

9. Read it a few years ago

sometime in '67 or '68

[LoZoccolo]

10. If anyone hasn't, they can download it for free.

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/203

[seemunkee]

11. No, but I've seen the cabin

Its in Bethesda MD and was recently purchased by the county. Its only open to the public a few times during the year.

[raccoon]

12. Yes. Wrote a book report on it in high school.

Somewhat melodramatic, but it's worth the read.

[Critters2]

17. I've been debating whether it's melodramatic--ya know, laid on a bit thick

or not. Part of that is the writing style of the era, I know. But I also know that these things happened. Families were split up when slave owners sold them away from each other. Slaves were whipped to death, sold at auction like animals, etc.

Also, just learned that an escaped slave named Josiah Henson thought the book was based on his life. So, he didn't consider it over the top.

At any rate, the very institution of slavery was a horror.

[mitchum]

14. It's better agit-prop than it is literature

[fladonkey]

18. Read it first....

in elementery school and later in high school. FYI - I grew up in the South.

[Sequoia]

19. She was inspired by:

Sarah and Angelina Grimké

American abolitionists and social activists and daughters of a South Carolina slave-holding family, the Grimké sisters helped pioneer the antislavery and women's rights movements in the United States.

http://www.edwardsly.com/grimkes.htm

Their story was in my daugher's 6 grade history book. I had never heard of them in my history book I read in NC. I read the whole chapter on it, I was so amazed.

[femmocrat]

20. I read it in high school. n/t