“Who was Simon Legree and where did he come from? The archetypal villain first appears in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) as the brutal degenerate who flogs Tom to death.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.