The most influential American novel?

It’s me, Richard Saunders of Poor Richard’s Almanac fame, back again today to talk about American novels. The topic came up because we referred to practical jokers in yesterday’s post about wacky blog searches. I couldn’t help but wonder at the origin of the phrase “practical joke,” since it struck me as an oxymoron: There’s nothing practical about a joke! Our friend Ben and Silence Dogood were unable to shed any light on the matter, so I turned to my good friend Google for an explanation of this curious phrase.

Typing in “origin of phrase practical joke” brought me to a page of links, including one to an X-rated Wikipedia article, “Tea bag (sexual act).” Yow, I had no idea Wikipedia was that all-inclusive! Or that Google searches were that imprecise. But there was a helpful link to the Word Detective, www.word-detective.com.

What does all this have to do with influential American novels, or novels at all for that matter, you ask? Well, clicking on the link to the Word Detective didn’t take me directly to “practical joke,” but rather to the top of the screen that eventually scrolled down to the answer to my question. But I figured it couldn’t hurt to read the stuff on the way down, just in case I might learn something on the way. And boy, did I ever.

A reader had written in to ask the Word Detective about the origin of the phrase “grow like Topsy.” I’d heard this used many times before, in the sense of grow rapidly and out of control, but I didn’t know where it came from either and had never really given it much thought; I guess I always assumed it meant “grow like a weed” and left it at that. “Grow like kudzu” would be the modern-day equivalent.

Was I in for a surprise! The Word Detective explained that the origin of “grow like Topsy” was the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe and published in 1852. Topsy was a slave girl in the novel.

I was very surprised to learn the origin of this expression, and I’m willing to bet most of you are, too. But the other things the Word Detective said about Uncle Tom’s Cabin were even more surprising. I’ve never read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and I don’t know anybody else who has, either. In our day, “Uncle Tom” has come to mean a grinning, subservient Black man who toadys up to Whitey. Who’d want to read a book about that?

News flash: Just about everybody, if you lived in pre-Civil War America. Uncle Tom’s Cabin “outsold every book previously published in America except the Bible,” according to the Word Detective. S/he went on to say that it was “probably the most influential American novel ever written.”

Yikes. Could that be true? Thinking it over, I found it hard to argue with the logic behind the statement. That one novel had so influenced the sentiments of Americans that it had made the Civil War possible. How many American novels have started wars?

Trying to think of other American novels that might claim similar influence, I couldn’t think of any. Yes, there were early novels that defined the relationship of settlers to the New Land, such as James Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer series (including The Last of the Mohicans) and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series. There were The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Little Women, Gone with the Wind, The Good Earth. There were Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, Theodore Dreiser and Thomas Wolfe, Washington Irving and Henry James, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, Philip Roth and John Updike. There were The Red Badge of Courage, The Jungle, The Catcher in the Rye, The Grapes of Wrath, Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Godfather. I’d add In Cold Blood to this list if you could consider it to be a novel rather than a work of narrative nonfiction.

But did any of them start a war? Did any of them change the way an entire nation looked at itself? Each offered insights, but none galvanized a nationwide response the way Uncle Tom’s Cabin did. Only British-born Thomas Paine’s nonfiction essay, Common Sense, did that, changing Colonial perception from a willingness to endure whatever England imposed on her colonies in favor of what came to be the American Revolution. 

I’m still not planning to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But I still can’t think of a more influential American novel. Can you?

               Warmly,

                          Richard