FROM The Book Lover's Cookbook

     "Fiction isn't an ivory tower.  It isn't a dodge from real life.  It can be where we most completely encounter 'real life.' 
     Millions knew that slavery was wrong.  Thousands had heard escaped slaves speak movingly of what they had suffered.  Their memoirs were widely read.
      Harriet Beecher Stowe drew upon some of these memoirs in Uncle Tom's Cabin.  In her fictional story -- acknowledged to be wooden, wordy, and poorly plotted -- she hammered away at the separation of families.  Thousands of fathers and mothers, reading this book aloud by their firesides, looked down at the listening faces of their own children and knew that they could no longer be indifferent to slavery.
      When he met Stowe, President Abraham Lincoln greeted her as 'the little woman who wrote the book that made ths great war.'  He ascribed the Civil War to the effect of her book."
                      (Susan Shaughnessy,  Walking on Alligators)