题目内容
This Ohio period gave Stowe the impetus to write Uncle Tom's Cabin. Cincinnati was just across the river from the slave trade, and she observed firsthand several incidents which galvanized her to write famous anti-slavery novel. Scenes she observed on the Ohio River, including seeing a husband and wife being sold apart, as well as newspaper and magazine accounts and interviews, contributed material to the e-merging plot. The family shared her abolitionist sentiment and was active in hiding runaway slaves.
In 1850 Calvin Stowe was appointed at Bowdoin, and the entire family returned to the Northeast. They reached Boston at the height of the public furor over the 1850 Fugitive Slaye Law, which mandated the return of runaway slaves already in the North to their owners. Many former slaves fled to Canada from their homes in New England. Harriet set about writing a polemical novel illustrating the moral responsibility of the entire nation for the cruel system. She forwarded the first episodes to Dr. Bailey, editor of the Washington anti-slavery weekly, The National Era. He agreed to pay $ 300 for the work, then published it in 40 installments. The suspenseful episodes were read weekly to families and gatherings throughout the land. Despite The National Era's small circulation, limited to an audience already sympathetic to abolitionism, the installments reached a large audience as worn copies were passed from family to family. Although many Northerners considered slavery a political institution for which they had no personal responsibility, Uncle Tom's Cabin was becoming a national sensation.
The episodes attracted the attention of Boston publisher, J. P. Jewett, who published the work in March of 1852. Uncle Tom's Cabin immediately broke all sales records of the day: selling half-a-million copies by 1857. Harriet Beecher Stowe received royalties only on the American editions; unauthorized dramatic productions boomed, as did a profusion of artifacts, "Tomitudes," based on the story. Pirated European editions also had astronomical sales. Putnam's Magazine called Uncle Tom's Cabin "the first real success in bookmaking." Stowe went on to many other literary projects, producing about a book a year from 1862 to 1884. For all the attention given to Uncle Tom's Cabin, it's far from Stowe's best work. She did write one other novel about life in the south, but much of her best work has nothing the south at all. In fact, Stowe's best writing is about village life in the New England's states in the 19th century. However, she is still most remembered as the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
What contributed to Stowe's success in writing?
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