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Stowe, Harriet Beecher
3 articles on Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 1205 Includes: Bibliography(b. 14 June 1811; d. 1 July 1896), the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), the best-selling antislavery novel humorously credited by President Abraham Lincoln with starting the Civil War. Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, Harriet Beecher was a member of the illustrious family of Lyman Beecher. Her sister Catharine became a prominent educator, and one of her brothers, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, sent rifles to abolitionists battling supporters of slavery in territorial Kansas in the 1850s. The seventh of nine children, Harriet attended Hartford Female Seminary, where she joined the staff as a full-time teacher in 1829. She moved to Cincinnati, Ohio , in 1832 when her father accepted a position at Lane Theological Seminary. In 1836she became the second wife of Calvin E. Stowe, a distinguished ...
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Source: The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature
Word Count: 5323 Includes: Early Life and Writings | Marriage, Family, Fiction, and Fame | Uncle Tom's Cabin | Stowe's Reputation | Stowe's New England Novels | Travel Commentaries | Children's Stories | Stowe's Contributions to American Literature | Selected Works | Further ReadingHarriet Beecher Stowe's reputationas an author of American literature is directly connected to Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly (1852), her first and best-known novel. With this text, Stowe gave American literature a novel that influenced the abolitionist movement, contributed to American iconography, and explored possibilities for women's involvement in political life. Stowe's text also offered fruitful material for puzzling over the quality of her writing and its peculiar power. During the nineteenth century, reviewers and critics debated Stowe's literary reputation, alternately praising her for her bold choices of subjects or criticizing her for her texts' artistic flaws. As the nature and importance of American literature were established in the early part of the twentieth century, literary historians either neglected to mention Stowe or compared her unfavorably to nineteenth-century male writers such as ...
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Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
Word Count: 590(1811–1896), novelist and abolitionist. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the widely popular antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was published in 1852 and went on to sell three hundred thousand copies the first year. Credited with mobilizing antislavery sentiment in the North, Stowe was praised, honored, and respected among African Americans both during her lifetime and in the years following.Uncle Tom's Cabin was based on various slave narratives, including those of Lewis Clarke, Frederick Douglass, and Josiah Henson. Legend has it that Henson was the model for Uncle Tom, and Henson capitalized on this legend by writing two more narratives after Uncle Tom's Cabin was published.The years following the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabinsaw African American authors publish a number of narratives, novels, ...
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