Published as a book on March 10, 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin catapulted her almost overnight from a writer of New England folkways to a national and international celebrity. Selling an unprecedented 300,000 copies within a year in the United States, the novel was even more popular in Great Britain, and it was immediately translated into French, Spanish, German, Dutch, and some dozen other languages. Further, more people probably had the novel read to them aloud, or saw it performed as a stage show than actually purchased a copy, and the lack of international copyright agreements ensured that an untold number of copies were simply pirated, printed, sold, and circulated without …
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