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DOWN THE RIVER.

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The best-selling American novel of the nineteenth century, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," by Harriet Beecher Stowe, does not quite go away, much as many Americans, from black militants to white aesthetes, might wish it. Withina year of its publication, in March of 1852, it had sold three hundred thousand copies, in a country one-thirteenth its present size and--in a surprising show of Victorian globalization--more than two million in the rest of the world. Ten years later, in 1862, Abraham Lincoln allegedly greeted its diminutive author in the White House with the words "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!" The President's subsequent abolition of slavery and the Union's hard-won victory in the Civil War would seem to have taken the wind out of Stowe's fiercely abolitionist novel of ideas, but its melodramatic images--the Kentucky slave Eliza's flight across the ice-choked Ohio River, pursued by bloodhounds, with her son in her arms; the Louisiana slaveholder Simon Legree's boastful villainy; fair-haired little Eva's saintly death and the snaggle-headed black orphan Topsy's reluctant reformation--persisted, though travestied, in popular plays, shows, films, figurines, and cartoons.

American readership did slowly decline, to the point that only secondhand copies were available when, in 1948, Modern Library reprinted the text, but "Uncle Tom's Cabin" continued to be read in Europe, especially in Russia, and by Anglophone men of letters. George Orwell cited it as the "supreme example" of a " 'good bad' book": "It is an unintentionally ludicrous book, full of preposterous melodramatic incidents; it is also deeply moving and essentially true." Edmund Wilson and Alfred Kazin gave it their critical attention; Kazin noted Henry James's recollection of his childhood reading, when "one lived and moved at the time, with great intensity, in Mrs. Stowe's novel," and his curious judgment that no other book "probably ever reached its mark, the mark of exciting interest, without having at least groped for that goal as a book or by the exposure of some literary side." In postwar academia, the novel excited interest as a female production during an "American renaissance" of masculine masterpieces canonized by such male critics as Lewis Mumford and F. O. Matthiessen. Stowe's biographer Joan D. Hedrick blames her subject's fall from critical grace on "the removal of literature from the parlor to institutions to which women had limited access: men's clubs, high-culture journals, and prestigious universities." Now a prominent scholar of African-American literature, the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has edited, with Hollis Robbins, of Johns Hopkins University, "The...

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