Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, into one of the most prominent religious families in America. Her father, Lyman Beecher, was a famous Calvinist preacher; her brother Henry Ward Beecher became the most celebrated clergyman of the age. She was educated at the Hartford Female Seminary, founded by her sister Catharine, and later moved to Cincinnati, where her proximity to slaveholding Kentucky and her encounters with fugitive slaves deepened her abolitionist convictions. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 galvanized her to write Uncle Tom's Cabin. This author hub collects 1 work in the Canon Compass ranking, led by Uncle Tom's Cabin.