Uncle Tom's Cabin (The Norton Library)

About the Author

Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in 1811 in Litchfield, Connecticut, where her father, Lyman Beecher, was an up-and-coming Presbyterian minister. She attended Hartford Female Seminary, which was founded by her older sister Catharine, a leader in the women’s education movement. Among her other notable siblings were Henry Ward Beecher, an influential clergyman and social reformer, and the suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker. In 1836 she married the biblical scholar Calvin Stowe, with whom she had seven children. Stowe is best known for her 1852 antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life Among the Lowly, which became an international bestseller. She went on to write more than thirty books of fiction and nonfiction, as well as stories, essays, and poems. Stowe died in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1896. Susan M. Ryan is Professor of English and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at the University of Louisville. She is the author of The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence (2003) and The Moral Economies of American Authorship: Reputation, Scandal, and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Marketplace (2016). Her current project investigates nineteenth-century Americans preoccupation with India.