Uncle Tom's Cabin(01 of09)
Open Image ModalWhen, in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, he famously said, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war." Lincoln went a little far in his flattery, but historians agree that Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) exerted a momentous influence on American culture, inflaming passions that helped bring on the most terrible war in our history. Moreover, Uncle Tom affected international opinion in important ways. Uncle Tom was the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century, and the novel's overseas success helped ensure that the British, whose economic interests lay in the South, stayed neutral. If the British had joined the fight, the South might have triumphed.
The Clansman(02 of09)
Open Image ModalIn 1901, a Baptist preacher from North Carolina, Thomas Dixon, squirmed through a theatrical adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Infuriated by the play's portrait of antebellum Southern life, he set to work on a response. In 1905 Dixon published a KKK-glorifying novel, The Clansman (1905), which the filmmaker D. W. Griffith adapted into an epic--and epically successful--film, The Birth of a Nation (1915). The "invisible empire" of the KKK was formed in 1866, but by the early 1870s it was all but dead. Birth's depiction of heroic Klansmen battling wild, lewd blacks, helped reinvigorate the KKK. By the mid 1920s the Klan's ranks were swollen with tens of thousands of new recruits, and it was again terrorizing the South.
Rienzi(03 of09)
Open Image ModalIn 1835, Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote a novel, Rienzi, about a heroic Roman tribune named Cola di Rienzi. The young composer Richard Wagner loved the novel, and adapted it into a grand opera, also called Rienzi (1842). In 1906, a teenaged opera fanatic watched spellbound from the cheap seats as Wagner's Rienzi unfolded in blasts of song. Afterwards, the elated boy walked the midnight streets for hours, feeling that Rienzi had shown him his own destiny: He would lead the German people "out of servitude to the heights of freedom." In the decades that followed, Adolf Hitler often spoke of his Rienzi epiphany, once telling a friend, "That was when it all began"--"it" being the process that turned an unpromising boy into the great Führer.
Atlas Shrugged(04 of09)
Open Image ModalAyn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged (1957) topped a 1991 Library of Congress/Book-of-the Month Club poll as the most influential novel of the 20th century. Along with novels like The Fountainhead (1943) and Anthem (1938), Atlas Shrugged has sold many millions of copies, spread a philosophy of hard-core anti-collectivism through American culture, inspired the Tea Party, made the rise of politicians like Ron Paul possible, influenced Federal Reserve policy (Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan was a Rand disciple who found the ultra-capitalist message of Atlas Shrugged "radiantly exact") and continues to serve--as Rand biographer Jennifer Burns puts it--as "the ultimate gateway drug" to the American right.
The Iliad(05 of09)
Open Image ModalAccording to Plutarch, Alexander the Great slept with two items under his pillow: a knife and Homer's Iliad, considering the latter to be "a perfect portable treasure of all military virtue and knowledge." Alexander hoped to go down in history as a new Achilles--a hero who would cast all others in shadow. Historians argue that the Iliad sharpened Alexander's thirst for immortal glory, and propelled his gory crusades to the edges of the earth. A character in Samuel Richardson's novel Charles Grandison (1753) voices a sentiment most modern historians would agree with: "Would Alexander, madman as he was, have been so much a madman, had it not been for Homer?"
The Sorrows of Young Werther(06 of09)
Open Image ModalIn 1774, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's published The Sorrows of Young Werther, an epistolary novel about a lovelorn young man who takes his own life. The sensational international best-seller created an epidemic of "Werther fever," with young men faithfully copying the hero's mannerisms and distinctive dress: blue-tailed coats, yellow waistcoats, and trousers with high boots. Many read Sorrows as a stirring moral defense of suicide, and the novel is notorious for inspiring a spate of copycat suicides (the "Werther effect" is modern psychology's term for copycat suicide). Modern scholars believe the number of actual suicides may have been exaggerated, but Goethe himself was concerned enough that, in 1775, he added a prefatory poem to the novel. The final line exhorts the reader, in the voice of Werther's ghost: "Be a man and do not follow me."
A Christmas Carol (07 of09)
Open Image ModalEndless adaptations of Charles Dickens' novella A Christmas Carol (1843)--in school plays, radio programs, films, and even children's cartoons (see Disney's Scrooge McDuck)--are largely responsible for how we celebrate Christmas. In The Man Who Invented Christmas (2008), Les Standiford points out that before Dickens wrote his tale, "Christmas was a relatively minor affair that ranked far below Easter, causing little more stir than Memorial Day or St. George's Day today." Dickens massively elevated the holiday's cultural profile, started traditions like turkey for Christmas dinner (Scrooge buys the Cratchits a turkey instead of the traditional holiday goose), and generally defined the holiday's spirit of charity and good cheer. Depending on our perspective, we can either thank Dickens for all of this or we can side with Christopher Hitchens, who blames Dickens for "the grisly inheritance that is the modern version of Christmas."
The Bible(08 of09)
Open Image ModalFlip through the Bible and you will be flipping through the world's most history-bending anthology of stories: The Fall, the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham and Isaac, the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. It is impossible to overstate how profoundly belief in these stories--along with the sacred myths of other faiths--has changed the world. Religion is the ultimate expression of story's dominion over the human mind. The heroes of sacred stories do not respect the barrier between the pretend and the real. They swarm through the real world, exerting massive influence. Based on what the sacred stories say, believers regulate the practices of their lives: how they eat, when they have sex, when they forgive, and when they wage total war in the name of everything holy.
Will and Grace(09 of09)
Open Image ModalOver the last two decades, American attitudes toward homosexuality have rapidly liberalized. Social scientists give most of the credit to the sit-com "Will and Grace." The strongest predictor of straight attitudes toward homosexuality isn't political or religious affiliation--it's whether a straight person has gay family members and friends. And here's the cool part: the friend doesn't even need to be real. We relate to fiction characters like actual people--we form judgments about them which we extend to generalizations about groups. Over almost fifteen years in prime time and syndication, tens of millions of Americans have laughed along with "Will and Grace," coming to know, like, and root for its characters. It's surprising, but true: uptight Will and his wacky sidekick Jack--along with appealing gay characters on shows like "Ellen", "Six Feet Under", and "Modern Family"--may have done more to transform the status of homosexuals than direct political action like marches and protests.