The Novel That Changed America | Hacker News Reader

The Novel That Changed America

online.wsj.com

38 pointsjkuria9 comments

Uncle Tom's Cabin is an awful book. First off, it's boring and damn near unreadable (it was one of the only assigned books I never made it through in college). But in a larger sense, the slaves are "heroic" and "emotionally nuanced" only in the sense that HBS makes them fulfill a racial type: sympathetic, penitent, long-suffering Christians. They're treated more as people than as property, but more as caricatures than as people.

The interesting contradiction of UTC, to me, is that it had this enormous significance to history despite being terribly written. As a modern reader, I couldn't get any emotion about the book other than it being terrible. James Baldwin trashes the book brutally but fairly in his great essay "Everybody's Protest Novel": http://www.uhu.es/antonia.dominguez/semnorteamericana/protes...

Before I even clicked on the link I was 80% sure it would be uncle tom's cabin. The other candidate in my mind was 'the jungle' aka the uncle tom's cabin of the labour movement.

One of those books so many people reference without having read. It's almost weird that it's the WSJ that's referencing it.

When I saw the WSJ link, and knowing HN, I was expecting this to be about Atlas Shrugged, or something similar.

This belongs on HN why?

From the Guidelines:

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Works for me.

That's a uselessly broad criterion. If I want to read about literature there are dozens of other specialized sites with much better informed contributors. The value of this site depends on a meaningful focus.

It's the criterion of the site-owner and runner.

If you do not like the criteria that he uses to run his site, then possibly you would be happier using a site with different criteria, or forming your own site?

In the many years I've been reading and posting here this criterion has been interpreted to imply subjects that have some intrinsic interest to hackers. It's symptomatic of the decline of HN that this focus is increasingly diluted but the dearth of worthwhile comments on this thread suggests I'm far from the only one that doesn't care.

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