Among the novels relating to life in the Southern States, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is the most prominent.  The circulation and fame of this book have been the most remarkable phenomenon in the annals of literature.  Within a year, more than two hundred thousand copies were sold in the United States, and fully a million in England.  Thirteen different translations were issued in Germany, four in France, and two in Russia; the Magyar language boasted three separate versions; the Wallachian, two; the Welsh, two; and the Dutch, two; while the Armenian, Arabic, Romaic, and all the European languages had at least one version.  The book was dramatized in not less than twenty different forms, and was acted all over Europe.  In France, and still more in England, all other books and all other subjects became, for the time, secondary to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”  This extraordinary popularity was chiefly due to the importance and novelty of the subject treated.  Mrs. Stowe imparted a considerable narrative interest to her work, and gave to her characters a very life-like effect.  Her pathetic and humorous scenes are natural and well arranged.  The peculiarities of negro life and habits of thought are placed before the reader with genuine sympathy and truth.  Uncle Tom and Topsy are fine and original creations.  But taken simply as a novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is not more remarkable than a hundred others, and cannot compete with such works as “Tom Jones,” “Adam Bede,” or “David Copperfield.”  Mrs. Stowe’s extraordinary success was fully deserved, but it resulted less from the literary excellence of her work, than from the fact that when one great subject rose pre-eminent in the public mind, she was able to embody it in a popular and easily comprehended form.  Gilmore Simms and John P. Kennedy have contributed largely to the novel of Southern life.  Mr. G.W.  Cable is now studying Louisiana characters, and Judge Tourgee the general condition of the South since the war.

Novels descriptive of Western life have been written by Charles Fenno Hoffman, James Hall, Timothy Flint, Thomas, and O’Connell.  But none of these writers have given such original sketches of character, or have so graphically portrayed the spirit of life in the far West as Mr. Bret Harte.  “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and the other stories of this talented writer have opened a vein of romance where it was least expected.

American fiction has been exceptionally rich in stories adapted to the juvenile mind, among which the most prominent are Mrs. Whitney’s “Faith Gartney’s Girlhood,” Miss Alcott’s “Little Women,” and Mr. T.B.  Aldrich’s “Story of a Bad Boy.”  Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque,” are remarkable for intensity and vividness of conception, combined with a circumstantial invention almost equal to that of Defoe.  Mrs. Burnett and Mr. J.W.  De Forest are still writing excellent novels of American life; and Mr. Henry James, Jr., is studying that peculiar form of human nature known as the American in Europe.[210]