Beyond the Book
Uncle Tom's Cabin, Absinthe & Brooklyn
- Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe was the best-selling novel of the 19th century (and the second best-selling book of that century, following the Bible) and is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850's. In the first year after it was published, 300,000 copies of the book were sold in the United States alone. Considering that the population of the USA was about 23 million in 1850 that would be equivalent to about 4 million copies being sold in one year today. The book's impact was so great that when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe at the start of the American Civil War, Lincoln is often quoted as having declared, "So this is the little lady who made...
