to Christianity itself." George Orwell in his essay "Good Bad Books", first published in Tribune in November 1945, claims that "perhaps the supreme example of the 'good bad' book is Uncle Tom's Cabin. It is an unintentionally ludicrous book, full of preposterous melodramatic incidents; it is also deeply moving and essentially true; it is hard to say which quality outweighs the other." But he concludes "I would back Uncle Tom's Cabin to outlive the complete works of Virginia Woolf or George Moore, though I know of no strictly literary test which would show where the superiority lies." The negative associations related to Uncle Tom's Cabin, in particular how the novel and associated plays created and popularized racial stereotypes, have to some extent obscured the book's historical impact as a "vital antislavery tool". After the turn of the millennium, scholars such as Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Hollis Robbins have re-examined Uncle Tom's Cabin in what has been called a "serious attempt to resurrect it as both a central document in American race relations and a significant moral and political exploration of the character of those relations." Literary significance Generally recognized as the first best-selling novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin greatly influenced development of not only American literature but also protest literature in general. Later books that owe a large debt to Uncle Tom's Cabin include The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. Despite this undisputed significance, Uncle Tom's Cabin has been called "a blend of children's fable and propaganda". The novel has also been dismissed by several literary critics as "merely a sentimental novel"; critic George Whicher stated in his Literary History of the United States that "Nothing attributable to Mrs. Stowe or her handiwork can account for the novel's enormous vogue; its author's resources as a purveyor of Sunday-school fiction were not remarkable. She had at most a ready command of broadly conceived melodrama, humor, and pathos, and of these popular sentiments she compounded her book." Other critics, though, have praised the novel. Edmund Wilson stated that "To expose oneself in maturity to Uncle Tom's Cabin may therefore prove a startling experience. It is a much more impressive work than one has ever been allowed to suspect." Jane Tompkins stated that the novel is one of the classics of American literature and wonders if many literary critics dismiss the book because it was simply too popular