Harriet Beecher Stowe |
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Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in Litchfield, Connecticut on June 14, 1811, the seventh child of Lyman and Roxanna Foote Beecher. Her family produced a number of religious leaders, teachers, and reformers, focusing on abolitionism as one of their chief causes.
At 13, Stowe was sent away to school in Hartford. In 1832 she rejoined her family in Cincinnati, where her father ran the Lane Theological Seminary, and began work at her sister Catherine’s school for girls. Her proximity to Kentucky, a slave state, made her and her family increasingly aware of the horrors of slavery, which they protested vehemently. In 1836 she married Calvin Ellis Stowe, and soon after that began her family. The Stowes had seven children: twins Harriet and Eliza, Henry, Frederic, Georgiana, Samuel, and Charles.
In 1843 Stowe published her first book, The Mayflower. She continued to teach and write after its publication, and in 1852 she published her best-selling classic, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the first novel to criticize the institution of American slavery. Her instant success prompted the Independent magazine in New York to offer her a position, and she was asked to tour England where she was received by Queen Victoria. In 1853 she published A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book on the sources of her popular novel.
Stowe lectured and wrote for twenty-five years before slipping into the chronic illness and senility that began in 1878. She died on July 1, 1896 and was buried in Andover, Massachusetts.
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