Biography

"Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in Litchfield, Connecticut and brought up with puritanical strictness. She had one sister and six brothers. Her father, Lyman Beecher, was a controversial Calvinist preacher. Her mother, Roxana Foote, died at forty-one – when Stowe was four. Her aunt, Harriet Foote, deeply influenced Stowe's thinking, especially with her strong belief in culture. Samuel Foote, her uncle, encouraged her to read works of Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. When Stowe was eleven years old, she entered the seminary at Hartford, Connecticut, kept by her elder sister, Catherine. The school had advanced curriculum and she learned languages, natural and mechanical science, composition, ethics, logic, mathematics: subjects that were generally taught to male students. Four years later she was employed as an assistant teacher. 

Catherine and Harriet founded a new seminary, the Western Female Institute. With her sister, Stowe wrote a children's geography book. In 1834 Stowe began her literary career when she won a prize contest of the Western Monthly Magazine, and soon Stowe was a regular contributor of stories and essays. Her first book, The Mayflower, first appeared in 1843.

In 1836 Stowe married Calvin Ellis Stowe, a professor at her father's theological seminary. He was a widower; his late wife had been Stowe's friend. The early years of their marriage were marked by poverty. Over the next fourteen years Stowe had seven children. In 1850 Calvin Stowe was offered a professorship at Bowdoin, and the family moved to Brunswick, Maine. In Cincinnati Stowe had come in contact with fugitive slaves. She learned about life in the South from her own visits there and saw how cruel slavery was. In addition, the Fugitive Slave Law, passed by Congress in 1850, arose much protest - giving shelter or assistance to an escaped slave became a crime. And finally a personal tragedy, the death of her infant Samuel from cholera, led Stowe to compose her famous novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. It was first published in the anti-slavery newspaper The National Era, from June, 1851 to April, 1852, and later in book form. The story was to some extent based on both true events and the life of Josiah Henson."