“So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” Whether Abraham Lincoln greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe with those words during her 1862 visit to the White House is uncertain, but if so, they were accurate. Stowe was little—she stood less than five feet tall—and the novel she had written 10…

When we think of the world’s most influential books, a host of titles might come to mind: the epics of the ancient world, the Bible, the Quran, the philosophies left to us by the likes of Plato, Aristotle, and Marcus Aurelius, and so on down through the centuries. The possibilities appear inexhaustible. If we narrow…