Classic Book Club

Dublin youth Stephen Dedalus aspires to the life of a writer. James Joyce published his somewhat autobiographical first novel in 1916. In this work he develops the modernistic style that he would fully realize in ULYSSES, in which Dedalus is a character. To mark St. Patrick's Day, we're doing this as a joint event with the Celtic Culture Meetup, so it'll be on Monday night instead of Sunday afternoon, but at the same place.

Abraham Lincoln to Harriet Beecher Stowe: "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this big war!" Kentucky slave Uncle Tom lets himself be sold "down the river" (to save his fellow slaves from the same fate) and ends up the property of sadistic Texan Simon Legree. Meanwhile, house slave Eliza escapes with her son to save him from being sold. Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel (originally serialized in an abolitionist magazine) was an immediate sensation, becoming a best-seller in the US and Britain and helping heat up the crisis that led to the Civil War a decade later. It's a sprawling, somewhat uneven epic view of the whole slavery system, addressing issues such as the moral price paid by both slaves and owners, and raising questions still relevant today. (Is Uncle Tom really as subservient as many assume?)