Harriet Beecher Stowe, a prolific writer best remembered today
for Uncle Tom's Cabin, was born in Litchfield,
Connecticut, on June 14, 1811, into a prominent New England family.
Her father, Lyman Beecher, was a well-known Congregational
minister, and her brother Henry Ward Beecher became a distinguished
preacher, orator, and lecturer. Like all the Beechers she grew up
with a strong sense of wanting to improve humanity. At the age of
thirteen Harriet Beecher enrolled in the Hartford Female Seminary
and subsequently taught there until 1832, when the family moved to
Cincinnati. In Ohio she was an instructor at a school founded by
her elder sister Catharine, and she soon began publishing short
stories in the Western Monthly Magazine.
Four years later, in 1836, Harriet Beecher married Calvin Stowe, a
respected biblical scholar and theologian by whom she had seven
children. In order to supplement the family's meager income she
continued writing. The Mayflower, her first collection of
stories and sketches, appeared in 1843. During this period
abolitionist conflicts rocked Cincinnati, and Mrs. Stowe witnessed
firsthand the misery of slaves living just across the Ohio River in
Kentucky. But not until the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of
1850 was she inspired to write about their plight. After the family
resettled in Brunswick, Maine, when Mr. Stowe was hired as a
professor at Bowdoin College, she began working on a novel that
would expose the evils of slavery.
First serialized in the National Era, an abolitionist
paper, in forty weekly installments between June 5, 1851, and April
1, 1852, and published as a book on March 20, 1852, Uncle
Tom's Cabin was an enormous success. Tolstoy deemed it
a great work of literature 'flowing from love of God and man,' and
within a year the book had sold more than 300,000 copies.
When Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared in Great Britain Queen
Victoria sent Mrs. Stowe a note of gratitude, and enthusiastic
crowds greeted the author in London on her first trip abroad in
1853. In an attempt to silence the many critics at home who
denounced the work as vicious propaganda, Mrs. Stowe brought
out A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1853, which contained
documentary evidence substantiating the graphic picture of slavery
she had drawn. Dred (1856), a second antislavery novel,
did not enjoy the acclaim of Uncle Tom's Cabin, yet the
author had already stirred the conscience of the nation and the
world, fueling sentiments that would ignite the Civil War. When
Abraham Lincoln met her at the White House in 1862 he allegedly
remarked: 'So you're the little woman who wrote the book that
started this great war!'
In subsequent novels Stowe shifted her attention away from the
issue of slavery. Beginning with The Minister's
Wooing (1859), and continuing with The Pearl of
Orr's Island (1862), Oldtown Folks (1869),
and Poganuc People (1878), she presented a perceptive and
realistic chronicle of colonial New England, focusing especially on
the theological warfare that underscored Puritan life. In a second
and less popular series of novels—My Wife and
I (1871), Pink and White Tyranny (1871), and We
and Our Neighbors (1875)—she depicted the mores of post-Civil
War America. Mrs. Stowe did enjoy success, however, with the
controversial Lady Byron Vindicated (1870), a bold
defense of her friend Anne, Lady Byron, that scandalously revealed
Lord Byron's moral delinquency. In addition she became a regular
contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, which published many of
the memorable short stories later collected in Oldtown
Fireside Stories (1872) and Sam Lawson's Oldtown Fireside
Stories (1881).
Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote little during the last years of her
life. She died in Hartford, Connecticut, on July 1, 1896. Perhaps
Mrs. Stowe's achievement was best summed up by abolitionist
Frederick Douglass who said: "Hers was the word for the hour."
"Uncle Tom's Cabin is the most powerful and enduring work of art
ever written about American slavery."
—Alfred Kazin
"Uncle Tom's Cabin is the most powerful and enduring work of art
ever written about American slavery."
-Alfred Kazin
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