1811-1896 · American author and abolitionist, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin
About Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, a daughter of the Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher, and sister of the preacher Henry Ward Beecher. From 1832 to 1850 she lived in Cincinnati, across the Ohio River from slaveholding Kentucky, where she married the biblical scholar Calvin Stowe. She wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin in Brunswick, Maine, after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and went on to write A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), Dred (1856) and many novels of New England life.
Uncle Tom's Cabin follows two lines of story that begin on the Kentucky farm of Arthur Shelby, a kindly but indebted master who agrees to sell two slaves to the trader Haley: Uncle Tom, his faithful and devout manager, and Harry, the small son of Eliza, Mrs. Shelby's maid. Overhearing the bargain, Eliza flees north with Harry that night, and with the slave-catchers close behind she crosses the Ohio River by leaping from one floating cake of ice to another.