Oldtown Folks

Possibly a greater work of art than Uncle Tom's Cabin, Oldtown Folks gives a penetrating and panornamic view of life in a New England village in the years following the Revolutionary War, and before the coming of the railroad and the steam engine. This book is beautiful, filled with rich insights about people and very humorous. In gives a vivid portrait of the social life and thinking of the people in the era. Stowe wrote the book in an effort to preserve for future generations the life, which she had known growing up as a child and which she saw passing away under the force of industrialization. She succeeded marvelously. This work along with perhaps five or six other novels by Stowe are a neglected national treasure. America would not be the society it is today, if Harriet Beecher Stowe were widely read and discussed. The society which did so at the time this work was written was capable of electing Abraham Lincoln to be President. One can only hope that such a day might come again.