Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe is a significant novel in American Literature and in American history. Abraham Lincoln, when he first met the author said, "So this is the little lady who started this great war." Her novel was immensely popular when she wrote it. But in the twenty-first century there is a cynical and academically bankrupt attempt to take it off the shelf of the Great Canon of American Literature.

The novel concerns the life of slaves, Eliza, Uncle Tom, George Harris and Harry. Uncle Tom remains true to his Christian faith in spite of cruel oppression. The attitudes of slave owners are explored. They range from the sadistic Simon Lagree to the virtuous but deluded St. Claire.

At the time it was written there was no doubt about its instant importance. Its vibrant and merciless abolitionist attitude was vital to the cause. It showed the moral turpitude of owning slaves and represented slaves as human beings. It showed the problematic Northern prejudice against blacks, even amongst the abolitionists themselves. Not until Mark Twain's character Jim appears in Huckleberry Finn do we see a more realistic representation of African-Americans.

But after a century and then some of realism and naturalism, modern scholarship has been quick to dismiss this novel as purely sentimental. Well, it is sentimental and melodramatic. On the other hand, life is pretty melodramatic in the first person. It is only realistic and naturalistic in the third. You see, we imbue our own lives with meaning, with melodramatic pathos, while we live it. That's why the civil strife and genocide in Darfur makes less impact on a group of teenagers than the cancellation of the prom. In 1853, Stowe published a work called A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin in which she outlines at great length the real life people upon which her book's character's are based, and goes over the very real lives upon which the melodrama of her book was created.

But this effort in Academia to impugn this great novel is less than honest. Darryl Lorenzo Wellington calls it "a blend of children's fable and propaganda." To the modern intellectual, it appears no better than an Uncle Remus story. George Witcher claims about the book that "Nothing attributable to Mrs. Stowe or her handiwork can account for the novel's enormous vogue; its author's resources as a purveyor of Sunday-school fiction were not remarkable. She had at most a ready command of broadly conceived melodrama,

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