Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe (born Harriet Beecher) grew up in a religious family in Connecticut. At 21, she moved to Cincinnati, where she joined a literary club and met Calvin Ellis Stowe, a slavery critic who would become her husband. The Stowes became involved in the Underground Railroad, and beginning in 1851, Stowe started publishing weekly installments of her anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In 1852, it was published as a book and became incredibly popular, energizing anti-slavery forces in the North. In 1862, Stowe traveled to Washington D.C. and met President Abraham Lincoln. She went on to write a total of 20 books. Stowe died in 1896, at age 85, in Hartford, Connecticut.