Customer Reviews

Uncle Tom's Cabin (Library of America Paperback Classics)

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I purchased this edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin because I know that Library of America books are the best quality and most definitive editions available of the works they publish.

This edition includes an introduction written by James M. McPherson, the acclaimed Civil War author (Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom, Crossroads of Freedom, For Cause and Comrades, and most recently, Abraham Lincoln), which is also well worth reading as it puts this well-known book into good historical context.

The book is a paperback but larger format than most - essentially identical in size to the Library of America hardcover editions - and as all other LOA editions it is printed on very high quality paper (acid free).

This Library of America printing is a fine edition to purchase if you want a high quality book for your library, and you care that the text of the book is the most accurate available (see below), and it is very reasonably priced. There are many different and cheaper printings available, but not to these standards. This is the version I will always recommend to anyone wanting to add this to their collection or give to someone as a gift.

For those who are interested in the specifics of why this edition is different from ANY other presently available (other than LOA's own hardcover), I offer the following, from the Library of America website (this came from their explanation for the hardcover LOA book Harriet Beecher Stowe: Three Novels: Uncle Tom's Cabin; The Minister's Wooing; Oldtown Folks which includes two other novels by Stowe, and I have edited this to retain only the comments relevant to Uncle Tom's Cabin):

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"This edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin uses the text of the first American book edition, which first appeared in the serial publication National Era, June 1851-April 1852. Both the periodical and book publications contain extensive punctuation changes from Stowe's original manuscript, for she relied primarily on dashes, and as she wrote in 1868, "My printers always inform me that I know nothing of punctuation, and I give thanks that I have no responsibility for any of its absurdities!" Since Stowe did some proofreading and correcting for the book publication, based on the periodical publication, the book edition represents Stowe's intentions more completely.

The first edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin (Boston: J. P. Jewett, 1852) appeared in two volumes and contained some minor revisions. Stowe changed the name of Senator Burr to Senator Bird and corrected portions of the text. In addition, she wrote a preface for the book. Stowe's identification, in a footnote, of Rev. Dr. Joel Parker of Philadelphia as the author of the view that the evils of slavery were linked with evils "inseparable from any other relations in social and domestic life" led to an extended controversy with Parker, although the footnote was removed in later printings. Stowe's decreasing correction of Negro dialect in the novel indicates her increasing confidence in her use of black colloquial language.

The standards for American English continue to fluctuate and in some ways were conspicuously different in earlier periods from what they are now. In nineteenth-century writings, for example, a word might be spelled in more than one way, even in the same work, and such variations might be carried into print. Commas were sometimes used expressively to suggest the movements of voice, and capitals were sometimes meant to give significances to a word beyond those it might have in its uncapitalized form. Since modernization would remove these effects, this volume has preserved the spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and wording of the first editions, which, of the available texts, appear most faithful to Stowe's intentions.

The present edition is concerned only with representing the texts of these editions; it does not attempt to reproduce features of the typographic design--such as the display capitalization of chapter openings. Footnotes within the text are by Stowe. Open contractions are retained as they appeared in the original texts. However some changes have been made. A Table of Contents has been added to The Minister's Wooing corresponding to the chapter titles in the original edition. Typographical errors have also been corrected."
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