Uncle Tom

"Stowe's blockbuster novel continues to provoke debate and touch raw nerves. For Adena Spingarn, it serves as an introduction to the long history of haggling over the meanings of race in America. There are numerous studies of Uncle Tom's Cabin. This is the richest, most provocative, and most stylishly written of the lot."—Benjamin Reiss, Emory University

"Adena Spingarn's grand history of Uncle Tom is both a rich study of the nineteenth-century reception of the novel and a timely analysis of the twentieth-century role of Jim Crow, the myth of the Lost Cause, and the codes of Hollywood in reshaping a major political and cultural symbol. A stirring and revelatory book."—Elaine Showalter, Professor Emerita, Princeton University

"Spingarn's ambitious volume traces how "Uncle Tom," first seen as a revolutionary exemplar of black dignity and spiritual power, became a potent racial slur....Drawing on her extensive research in digitized archives of periodicals and adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Spingarn unfolds ambivalent responses to the Uncle Tom figure by both white and African Americans....Essential."—M. L. Robertson, CHOICE

"[Uncle Tom] demonstrates how careful re-reading of contemporary materials can make us rethink the received interpretation of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Spingarn's book is extremely useful for scholars who wish to know how Uncle Tom turned from martyr into traitor and how a new generation of black intellectual leaders reshaped the meaning of an iconic literary character."—Debra J. Rosenthal, Review 19

"With crisp prose and a broad array of materials that spans representational forms,Uncle Tom: From Martyr to Traitoris necessary reading for anyone interested in how the title character of the most influential work of American literature became so much more than, and so very different from, what his creator could have ever imagined."—Douglas A. Jones, Jr., The American Historical Review