When Harriet Beecher Stowe died at her home on July 1, 1896, the author of the extensive obituary in the New York Times called her death “one of the closing leaves in an era of our century.”[1] Similarly, her hometown newspaper, the Hartford Courant, observed: “The death of Mrs. Stowe removes from this world one of the most interesting and conspicuous figures of this generation.”[2] The well-known African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar published a laudatory poem about her in the Century Magazine in 1898. While the tributes immediately after her death were international in scope, in the following Stowe’s reputation faded. Through the early twentieth century Uncle Tom’s Cabin was largely unread and certainly little studied as literature.