Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American novelist, essayist, poet, reformer, and religious writer, born in Litchfield, Connecticut, on June 14, 1811. She was a daughter of the Congregational minister Lyman Beecher and was educated at the Hartford Female Seminary founded by her sister Catharine Beecher. After moving with her family to Cincinnati in 1832, she taught, wrote for periodicals, and entered the literary circle in which she met Calvin Ellis Stowe, a biblical scholar and clergyman whom she married in 1836.

Stowe became internationally known through Uncle Tom's Cabin, serialized in The National Era in 1851 and published as a book in 1852. Her wider output included Dred, The Minister's Wooing, Oldtown Folks, travel writing, essays, devotional prose, and poetry. Religious conviction shaped both her antislavery writing and her devotional work. Three of her hymn texts were included in her brother Henry Ward Beecher's Plymouth Collection of Hymns and Tunes in 1855, and she later gathered sacred verse in Religious Poems in 1867. Raised in New England Congregationalism, Stowe increasingly participated in Episcopal worship and was recorded as an Episcopal communicant in Hartford by the 1860s. She died in Hartford on July 1, 1896, leaving a literary legacy that joins social reform, fiction, Christian reflection, and hymnody.