By the time the last installment appeared, on April 1, 1852, the serialized chapters alone had drawn some fifty thousand readers, many of whom had come to eagerly look forward to Fridays, when each new edition of the National Era would arrive. The complete novel, titled Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Or, Life Among the Lowly (in promoting the serial, the newspaper used the subtitle “The Man That Was a Thing”), was published March 20, 1852, and made its forty-year-old author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, a literary sensation adored in the North, reviled in the South.
