Uncle Tom''s Cabin: A Norton Critical Edition

About Harriet Beecher Stowe

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 womens 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 Toms 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. Elizabeth Ammons is the Harriet H. Fay Professor of Literature at Tufts University. She is the author of Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century Edith Whartons Argument with America and Brave New Worlds: How Literature Will Save the Planet. She is the editor or co-editor of many books including Tricksterism in Turn-of-the-Century American Literature: A Multi-Cultural Perspective Uncle Toms Cabin: A Casebook American Color Writing 1880-1920 Short Fiction by Black Women 19001920 and the Norton Critical Edition of Edith Whartons The House of Mirth.