Published in 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin brought the abolitionist's message to the White House and beyond. No woman before or since has so successfully written a novel designed to motivate America to act on a major issue of the day. Controversial still, this novel has weathered continual debates on all aspects of its writing and its subject matter. In her eloquent introduction, Ann Douglas establishes the historical and literary significane of this...

This second Library of America volume of Washington Irving brings together for the first time three collections of his stories and sketches. Bracebridge Hall (1822) was published under the pseudonym Geoffrey Crayon, and centers on an English manor, its inhabitants, and the tales they tell. Interspersed with witty, evocative sketches of country life among the English nobility is the well-known tale "The Stout Gentleman" and stories based on English,...

In Main Street and Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis drew on his boyhood memories of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, to reveal as no writer had done before the complacency and conformity of middle-class life in America. These remarkable novels combine brilliant satire with a lingering affection for the men and women who, as Lewis wrote of Babbitt, want "to seize something more than motor cars and a house before it's too late." Main Street (1920), Lewis's first triumph,...