Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Elisabeth Beecher was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, a daughter of the prominent Calvinist preacher Lyman Beecher.

Harriet studied and later taught at the Hartford Female Seminary, founded by her sister Catharine Beecher, receiving an academic education unusual for women of her time.

In 1832 the Beecher family moved to Cincinnati, where across the river from slaveholding Kentucky Harriet encountered fugitive slaves and the abolitionist debate firsthand.

Harriet married Calvin Ellis Stowe, a widowed professor of biblical literature at Lane Theological Seminary, on 6 January 1836; they had seven children.

The Stowes moved to Brunswick, Maine, in 1850 when Calvin took a post at Bowdoin College; there, spurred by the Fugitive Slave Act, Harriet began Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Uncle Tom's Cabin was serialized in the National Era from 1851 and published in book form on 20 March 1852, selling 300,000 copies in the United States in its first year.

In 1853 Stowe published A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, documenting the factual sources behind her novel in response to critics.

Stowe made the first of three European tours in 1853, drawing huge crowds in Britain and receiving an anti-slavery petition signed by over half a million British women.

In 1873 Stowe moved to Forest Street in Hartford, Connecticut, where her neighbor was Mark Twain, and she lived there for the rest of her life.

Stowe died at her Hartford home at age 85 and was buried at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.