Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American writer and abolitionist who wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin", one of the most powerful novels of it's kind in American literature.

She was born on June 14, 1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut, the daughter of a liberal clergyman named Lyman Beecher and a mother, Roxana who died when she was a small child. The seventh of thirteen children, Harriet attended Hartford Female Seminary, receiving an education usually reserved for males of her era.

When Harriet was just 21, she moved to Cincinnati, Ohio to attend the Lane Theological Seminary, of which her father had recently become president.

While in Ohio, Harriet joined a literary salon whose members included, Emily Blackwell, the third woman to earn a medical degree in the United States.

Another member of the club was Rev. Calvin Ellis Stowe, an ardent opponent of slavery whom Harriet later married in 1836. Her first book, "The Mayflower" or "Sketches of Scene and Characters Among the Descendants of the Pilgrims", appeared in 1843. While living in Brunswick, Maine she wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin", a forceful indictment of slavery. It was serialized in an abolitionist paper, the National Era and issued as a book in 1852.

The book was an instant success and the next year Harriet published "A Key To Uncle Tom's Cabin", an impressive collection of documentary evidence in support of her attack on slavery. After the American Civil War, Harriet moved to Florida and became one of the first editors of "Hearth and Home" magazine, one of the first magazines to be targeted exclusively toward women.

Harriet Beecher Stowe died on July 1, 1896, at the age of 85. She was buried in Andover, Massachusetts in a historic cemetery.