When james baldwin wrote his scathing dual critique of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Richard Wright’s Native Son entitled “Everybody’s Protest Novel” in 1949, he was extending a pattern that had prevailed in the literary reputation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for half a century. The years between Stowe’s death and the early 1950s were characterized by increasing scholarly neglect of Stowe’s work (even as American literature was coming into its own as an academic discipline), increasing criticism of the racial politics of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (from Southern segregationists and from African Americans concerned about the stereotypical views of black life and culture to which the novel seemed to give credence), and a consolidation of Stowe’s biographical materials, first through the efforts of friends and family anxious to preserve her legacy, and then through the efforts of literary scholars who bucked the prevailing trend toward seeing Stowe as at best a minor writer. The rejection of Stowe’s work by many critics and historians reflected three interrelated tendencies: the vilification of Stowe as an abolitionist in explicitly racist popular writing, the association of Stowe’s original novel with the many racist appropriations of its storyline in popular culture by some African American critics who deemed Stowe herself to be a racist writer, and the emphasis in literary modernism on aesthetic complexity and difficulty, which led critics to dismiss Stowe’s work as propaganda and as an insufficiently intellectually strenuous undertaking for her readers.

The increasing racism of the Jim Crow era in American politics would find expression in works that sought to reverse the moral trajectory of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. One of the most troubling instances of this tendency appeared in Thomas F. Dixon’s virulently racist novel The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, 1865–1900 (1903). Dixon placed a direct reference to Stowe as a sort of ideological murderer in his novel, as one of his characters declaims, “A little Yankee woman wrote a book. The single act of that woman’s will caused the war, killed a million men, desolated and ruined the South, and changed the history of the world” (264). Dixon was characteristic of one side of the diminishment of the literary reputation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin through his attack on Stowe as a bloodthirsty fanatic; a more common approach would be to ignore Stowe altogether or damn her with faint praise.