orig. Harriet Elizabeth Beecher
born June 14, 1811, Litchfield, Conn., U.S.
died July 1, 1896, Hartford, Conn.
U.S. writer and philanthropist.
Stowe was the daughter of the famous Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher (17751863) and the sister of Henry Ward Beecher and Catharine Esther Beecher . She taught school in Hartford and in Cincinnati, where she came into contact with fugitive slaves and learned about life in the South, and later settled in Maine with her husband, a professor of theology. Her antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) had so great an impact that it was often cited (by Abraham Lincoln , among others) among the causes of the American Civil War. Her other works include the novels Dred (1856), also against slavery, and The Minister's Wooing (1859).