Stowe, Harriet Beecher

Stowe, Harriet Beecher (1811-1896), American writer and abolitionist, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1850-1852), a forceful indictment of slavery and one of the most powerful novels of its kind in American literature. She was born on June 14, 1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut, the daughter of the liberal clergyman Lyman Beecher. She married the Reverend Calvin Ellis Stowe, an ardent opponent of slavery. Her first book, The Mayflower, or Sketches of Scenes and Characters Among the Descendants of the Pilgrims, appeared in 1843. While living in Brunswick, Maine, she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. It was serialized in an abolitionist paper, the National Era, and issued as a book in 1852.

As a serial, the story attracted no unusual notice. The success of the book, however, was unprecedented; 500,000 copies were sold in the United States alone within five years, and it was translated into more than 20 foreign languages. It did much to crystallize militant antislavery sentiment in the North, and therefore was an important factor in precipitating the American Civil War. Uncle Tom's Cabin, like most of Stowe's novels, is rambling in structure, but rich in pathos and dramatic incident. In 1853 she issued A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, containing an impressive array of documentary evidence in support of her attack upon slavery. Stowe returned to the attack in Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856). The Minister's Wooing (1859) is the best known of Stowe's several romantic novels; she also wrote short stories and religious poetry. She damaged her reputation in Britain with a magazine article entitled “The True Story of Lord Byron's Life”, in which she claimed the poet had an incestuous love for his sister. She died on July 1, 1896.