Uncle Tom, Topsy, Sambo, Simon Legree, little Eva: their names are American bywords, and all of them are characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe's remarkable novel of the pre-Civil War South. Uncle Tom's Cabin was revolutionary in 1852 for its passionate indictment of slavery and for its presentation of Tom, "a man of humanity," as the first black hero in American fiction. Labeled racist and condescending by some contemporary critics, it remains a shocking,...

A comic book adaptation of Stowe's novel, followed by an essay.

Eliza is a slave who flees a Kentucky plantation after her son and a dignified father figure, Uncle Tom, are sold to a rival landowner. Her Dickensian quest eventually places her in the backwater kingdom of the sadistic Simon Legree. But the film's most memorable sequence is Eliza's flight to freedom across a treacherous ice floe (a staple of the many stage productions, which D.W. Griffith shamelessly appropriated for his 1920 film Way Down East)....