"When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn."
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), was an American, abolitionist, reformer and writer of 30 books. She was born on June 14, 1811 in a big family, in Litchfield, Connecticut, and raised in Hartford, where her father Lyman Beecher served as pastor of the Congregational Church. She had two sisters called Catharine and Mary and one half-sister called Isabella.
Harriet Beecher Stowe spent her first twelve years in the intellectual atmosphere of Litchfield. She married Clavin Ellis Stowe, a clergyman and widower, in 1836 and moved with him later to Brunswick, Maine, when he obtained an academic position at Bowdoin College. They had seven children but four of them died before her. Her husband encouraged to write and she became one of the best American authors of the 19th century.
She was best known by her significant anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin which was first published in serials from 1851 to 1852 in the National Era. She had never been to the American South and never saw a plantation, but she wrote A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, as a non-fiction work to document the veracity of her depiction of the lives of slaves in the original novel.
Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote also the preface of Josiah Henson's autobiography, the slave on whom her main character is often considered to be based. She followed that by her second novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp as the second anti-slavery novel.
Uncle Tom's Cabin reached millions of copies in hardcover and various forms later and was influential in the political issues of the 1850s energizing anti-slavery acts in the South and in the North.
She met President Lincoln in 1862, shortly before he issued the Emancipation and Lincoln addressed her saying: "So you're the little lady who wrote the book that started this great war!" She died on the 1st July, 1896.
Some of her works:Uncle Tom's Cabin 1852
A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin 1853
Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp 1856
The Minister's Wooing 1859
The Pearl of Orr's Island 1862
Old Town Folks 1869
Uncle Tom's Cabin (The Classic Collection) [AUDIOBOOK] [CD] [UNABRIDGED] (Audio CD)
by Harriet Beecher Stowe (Author), Buck Schirner (Narrator)
Published in 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin brought the abolitionists' message to the public conscience - no woman before or since has so moved America to take action against an injustice. Indeed, Abraham Lincoln greeted Stowe in 1863 as "the little lady who made this big war."
Eliza Harris, a slave whose child is to be sold, escapes her beloved home on the Shelby plantation in Kentucky and heads North, eluding the hired slave catchers. Aided by the Underground Railroad, Quakers, and others opposed to the Fugitive Slave Act, Eliza, her son, and her husband George run toward Canada.
As the Harrises flee to freedom, another slave, Uncle Tom, is sent "down the river" for sale. Too loyal to abuse his master's trust, too Christian to rebel, Tom wrenches himself from his family. Befriending a white child, Evangeline St. Clare, Tom is purchased by her father and taken to their home in New Orleans. Although Evangeline's father finally resolves to free his slaves, his sudden death places him in the ranks of those who mean well by their slaves but never take action. Tom is sent farther downriver to Simon Legree's plantation, and the whips of Legree's overseers.
