Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811 - 1896) was an American author. Her most well known work is Uncle Tom's Cabin.
- Harriet Beecher Stowe: BritannicaHarriet Beecher Stowe, née Harriet Elizabeth Beecher, (born June 14, 1811, Litchfield, Connecticut, U.S.—died July 1, 1896, Hartford, Connecticut), American writer and philanthropist, the author of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which contributed so much to popular feeling against slavery that it is cited among the causes of the American Civil War.
- Harriet Beecher Stowe CenterWe preserve and interpret Stowe’s Hartford home and the center’s historic collections, promote vibrant discussion of her life and work, and inspire commitment to social justice and positive change.
Research & Reference
- Harriet Beecher Stowe: Credo ReferenceA Credo Reference landing page on Harriet Beecher Stowe. This page includes links to reference works, journal articles, and a mind map.
- Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin & The Beecher Family and the Civil WarThe Beechers were one of the most influential families of their time. Its members had written and preached about the immorality of slavery for decades and had taken action in various ways, including the purchase and freeing of slaves. When the war began, they supported it. Like other abolitionist families, they sent family members into the war as soldiers, officers, chaplains and teachers: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s son, several nephews, two half-brothers, a brother-in-law, and a sister-in-law served in some capacity. Some Beechers survived the war intact, several were injured, and at least two suffered lasting psychological damage.
- The Harriet Beecher Stowe CenterThe Harriet Beecher Stowe Center holds the largest collection of materials related to Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the influential anti-slavery novel and 19th century best seller, and multiple other books. Decorative arts, works of art, furniture, memorabilia, rare manuscripts and print material, images and visual media –- 228,000 items — illustrate the lives and times of Stowe and her family.
- Stowe, Harriet Beecher: American National BiographyAn American National Biography page on Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Streaming Media
- Uncle Tom's CabinHarriet Beecher Stowe's famous novelization of the harsh realities of slavery was a catalyst for the anti-slavery movement and remains a landmark in American literature. Conceived as a super production on the scale of Foolish Wives and The Phantom of the Opera,this 1927 adaptation of Stowe's famous book cost $1.8 million and took two years to film.
- Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harriet TubmanUncle Tom's Cabin was a blockbuster novel that depicted the flight to freedom. Consider this depiction from two very different vantages: the world of the author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the life of Harriet Tubman, who was at the center of immediate and decisive steps being taken by enslaved people.
- Uncle Tom--The Hero as MartyrThe name “Uncle Tom” has complex associations today, but Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel had a truly powerful impact when it was published in 1852. Explore the historical circumstances of slavery that inspired Stowe’s novel, and then consider the fortitude that makes this meek, long-suffering character a hero.
Author's Works & Perspectives
The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin
Declared worthless and dehumanizing by James Baldwin in 1949, Uncle Tom's Cabin has lacked literary credibility for fifty years. Now, in a ringing refutation of Baldwin, Henry Louis Gates Jr. demonstrates the literary transcendence of Harriet Beecher Stowe's masterpiece. Uncle Tom's Cabin, first published in 1852, galvanized the American public as no other work of fiction has ever done. The editors animate pre-Civil War life with rich insights into the lives of slaves, abolitionists, and the American reading public. Examining the lingering effects of the novel, they provide new insights into emerging race-relation, women's, gay, and gender issues. With reproductions of rare prints, posters, and photographs, this book is also one of the most thorough anthologies of Uncle Tom images up to the present day.
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Easily the most controversial antislavery novel written in antebellum America, and one of the best-selling books of the nineteenth century, Uncle Tom's Cabin is often credited with intensifying the sectional conflict that led to the Civil War. In his introduction, David Bromwich places Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel in its Victorian contexts and reminds us why it is an enduring work of literary and moral imagination.
The New Housekeeper's Manual
Published in 1873 in New York, The New Housekeeper's Manual was written by Catharine Esther Beecher and her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, two of the most influential women writers and activists of their time. Both women exerted profound influence on American letters and on the shape of American domestic life and educational reform. The book combines two works by the sisters in one volume. The American Woman's Home: Or Principles of Domestic Science describes kitchen and home design, coping with kitchen appliances and newly invented gadgets, cooking healthful food and drink, caring for the sick with medical recipes, and gardening with plants and domestic animals. The Handy Cook-Book is a "complete, condensed guide to wholesome, economical, and delicious cooking with nearly 500 choice and tested recipes." The authors assert that their extensive manual was designed specifically for middle-class housewives, versus others written for women with money and servants. It includes housekeeping information and dishes for every occasion that the practical-minded housewife might need. The New Housekeeper's Manual was well received and had over 25 printings in 25 years. This edition of The New Housekeeper's Manual was reproduced by permission from the volume in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Founded in 1812 by Isaiah Thomas, a Revolutionary War patriot and successful printer and publisher, the Society is a research library documenting the life of Americans from the colonial era through 1876. The Society collects, preserves, and makes available as complete a record as possible of the printed materials from the early American experience. The cookbook collection includes approximately 1,100 volumes
Lady Byron Vindicated
A fascinating account of the separation of George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron and his wife Anne Isabella Noel Byron, 11th Baroness Wentworth and Baroness Byron, defending her role in the controversy.Lord Byron is best known as a poet, as well as being the father of the world's first computer programmer, Ada Countess of Lovelace.
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Three Novels
In this Library of America volume are the best and most enduring works of Harriet Beecher Stowe, "the little woman," as Abraham Lincoln said when he met her in 1861, "who wrote the book that made this great war." He was referring, with rueful exaggeration, to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), which during its first year had sold over 300,000 copies. Contemporary readers can still appreciate the powerful effects of its melodramatic characterizations and its unapologetic sentimentality. They can also recognize in its treatment of racial violence some of the brooding imagination and realism that anticipates Faulkner's rendering of the same theme. Stowe was charged with exaggerating the evils of slavery, but her stay in Cincinnati, Ohio, where her father (the formidable Lyman Beecher, head of the Lane Theological Seminary) gave her a close look at the miseries of the slave communities across the Ohio River. People in her circle of friends were continually harboring slaves who escaped across the river from Kentucky on the way, they hoped, to Canada. Two other novels, along with Uncle Tom's Cabin, show the range and variety of her literary accomplishment. The Minister's Wooing (1859) is set in Newport, Rhode Island, after the Revolution. It is a romance based in part on the life of Stowe's sister, and it traces to a happy ending the conflicts in a young woman between adherence to Calvinistic rigor and her expression of preference in the choice of a marital partner. The third novel, Oldtown Folks (1869), confirms Stowe's genius for the realistic rendering of ordinary experience, her talent for social portraiture with a keen satiric edge, and her subtlety in exploring a wide group of themes, from child-rearing practices and religious controversy to romantic seduction and betrayal. But finally, it is the old town and a way of life that no longer exists that is the true subject of this elegiac novel. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.