Harriet Beecher Stowe's timeless and moving novel, an incendiary work that fanned the embers of the struggle between free and slave states into the fire of the Civil War. Uncle Tom's Cabin is the story of the slave Tom. Devout and loyal, he is sold and sent down south, where he endures brutal treatment at the hands of the degenerate plantation owner Simon Legree. By exposing the extreme cruelties of slavery, Stowe explores society's failures and asks a profound question: "What is it to be a moral human being?" And as the novel that helped to move a nation to battle, Uncle Tom's Cabin is an essential part of the collective experience of the American people. With an Introduction by Darryl Pinckney and an Afterword by Jonathan Arac