Born as Harriet Elisabeth Beecher in Litchfield, Connecticut, to a family of abolitionists and social reformers, who supported the Underground Railroad and housed fugitive slaves in their home. After studying as a child at a girls’ school run by her older sister, at the age of 21, when she joined her father in Cincinnati, she taught at a school founded by her sister.
In Ohio, she joined a literary salon and social club, met her husband, and started to find her voice as an author, as she wrote sketches and stories to the local journals and the schools’ textbooks. When she was 35 years old, Stowe published her first book, ‘The Mayflower; or, Sketches of Scenes and Characters Among the Descendants of the Pilgrims’.
The family moved to Maine in 1850, the same year the Congress passed a law allowing hunting fugitive slaves and return them to their owners. A year later, Stowe’s 18-month-old son died. The two events led her to write about the injustice of slavery. At first, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ published in the newspaper in a serial form, and within a year it was released as a book and became a best seller. Her portrayal of slavery and its effects on individuals captured people’s attention, and through Stowe’s writing, they realized that slaves had families, hopes, and dreams like every human being.
The book sparked outrage in the south but was embraced by the abolitionists in the north, and according to some, it even helped Abraham Lincoln to win the 1860 elections. Stowe continued to write and promote social and political causes, and during her lifetime, Stowe published more than 30 books, including novels, memoirs, and collections of letters and articles.
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