Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851). Aside from its huge impact on the slavery debate and sectional crisis, it inspired an entire industry of merchandising, adaptations and responses, commercial as well as amateur: popular songs about characters and scenes from the novel; poems inspired by the novel; minstrel show adaptations; dolls, games, lithographs, dishware, and other UTC-related bric-a-brac (called "Tomitudes"), proslavery "anti-Tom" novels (the inverse of fan fiction?) Etc.

http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/sitemap.html

http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/interpret/exhibits/stevenson/stevenson.html

"The Sorrows of Young Werther" was published in 1774. The hero of this romantic novella written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe commits suicide at the end by shooting himself. After it's publication, Europe experienced a rash of copycat suicides.

Due to fears of the hysteria known as "Werther Fever", the novella was banned in several European countries, while it became trendy for young men to dress in the blue and yellow style of Young Werther. Cultural pilgrimages to Weimar, where part of the novella was set, became a de rigeur part of a young man's European Tour.

Even today, the copycat suicide phenomenon is known as "Werther Syndrome".