A Harvard freshman pieces together the strange story of a southern tragedy involving an ambitious planter who settled in Mississippi in 1833.

When a plantation proprietor and former slave--now possessing slaves of his own--dies, his household falls apart in the wake of a slave rebellion and corrupt underpaid patrollers who enable free black people to be sold into slavery.

Stowe's powerful abolitionist novel fueled the fire of the human rights debate in 1852. Denouncing the institution of slavery in dramatic terms, the incendiary novel quickly draws the reader into the world of slaves and their masters. Stowe's characters are powerfully and humanly realized in Uncle Tom, a majestic and heroic slave whose faith and dignity are never corrupted; Eliza and her husband, George, who elude slave catchers and eventually flee...

Studies the American slave community, encompassing the process of enslavement, the development of a black culture, and the slave's family life, religion, work, and physical environment.

Published in 1852, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" brought the abolitionist message to the White House and beyond - no woman before or since Harriet Beecher Stowe has so successfully written a novel designed to motive the United States to act on a major issue of the day. Controversial still, this novel has weathered continual debate on all aspects of its writing and its subject matter. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" tells the story of Uncle Tom, an enslaved person, depicted...

The story of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, "who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him."

"The Kitchen House continues the story of Jamie Pyke, son of both a slave and master of Tall Oakes, whose deadly secret compels him to take a treacherous journey through the Underground Railroad...This...stand-alone novel opens in 1830, and Jamie, who fled from the Virginian plantation he once called home, is passing in Philadelphia society as a wealthy white silversmith. After many years of striving, Jamie has achieved acclaim and security, only...