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Harriet Beecher Stowe

General Summary


Important Terms, People and Events

Harriet Beecher Stowe was born on June 14, 1811, into a family of extraordinarily gifted and promising siblings. The Beechers, later in their lives, would become a kind of intellectual Camelot, with Harriet Beecher Stowe and her famous brother, Henry Ward Beecher, at the head of the table.




The publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852 was an event that changed an already changing nation. The novel was an instant bestseller, going through 120 editions in a year. Harriet became, in the same year, the most beloved American author in the country, and the most hated. Northerners considered the very symbol of all that the anti-slavery movement stood for-never mind that she, in fact, advocated gradual emancipation of slaves rather than instant and irrevocable-and the South considered her a great threat to their way of life.

Although best known for Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote hundreds of novels, short stories, articles, children's books and religious inquiries. Each book she published was a bestseller; each issue of a magazine in which she published an article sold out overnight. People wanted to hear what she had to say, and even the best authors of the time respected her work–including Dickens, George Sand, Henry James and Anthony Trollope. However, despite her success as an author, she never saw her writing as anything other than a job. Her husband was the most important person in her life, and the care of her many children always came first in her life.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was a full-fledged celebrity, both in America and abroad, and Lincoln famously called her "the little lady that made this big war", in reference to the Civil War. Her many trips to Europe and England enlarged her mind, and her books sold as well abroad as they did in America.

When she died in 1896, Harriet Beecher Stowe's books had fallen out of favor, as the social issues had become less relevant and the art of the books had been thrown into question. However, Uncle Tom's Cabin remains in print today and is considered an extraordinarily important social document of a fractured America.

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