Books: Up from Slavery

GOODBYE TO UNCLE TOM (435 pp.)—J. C. Furnas—Sloane ($6).

Here is a book on the Negro in America with a startling thesis. Author J. C. Furnas (—And Sudden Death, Anatomy of Paradise) argues that all U.S. thinking about the Negro for the past century has been shaped directly or indirectly by one book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the play fashioned from it—to the Negroes' detriment.

According to Furnas, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the pious New England zealot was "small personally as well as physically, glib, lazy-minded, a common denominator of millions of the brains and...