The first critical call on record for “the great American novel” (by novelist John W. DeForest in 1868) names Uncle Tom's Cabin as the closest approximation yet. Small wonder. One can imagine at least four reasons why, especially in the aftermath of the Civil War. First, the novel's foregrounding of slavery as the defining national issue. Second, the book's sensational impact, provoking a vast array of imitations and refutations, perhaps even the Civil War itself (if we take seriously Abraham Lincoln's bon mot). Third, its record-breaking sales, which demonstrated the reality of national literary emergence as a hard economic fact: the United States was now the largest book market in the English-speaking world. And fourth, the novel's panoramic reach, combining the geographical scope of a Whitman with the sociological profusion of a Dickens.

This last was the point that especially interested DeForest. Though he scoffed at the books idealizing exoticization of Tom and Eva, he praised “the national breadth to the picture, truthful outlining of character, natural speaking, and plenty of strong feeling.” By contrast, all the other authors on his radar screen seemed provincial, even the incomparable Nathaniel Hawthorne; and he was harshly dismissive of Stowe’s own regionalist turn as well. (“Stricken with timidity, the author shrank into her native New England.”)