Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) was an American writer born in Connecticut into the formidable Beecher family of preachers and reformers. She lived for eighteen years in Cincinnati, across the river from slaveholding Kentucky, where she met fugitives and heard their stories, and after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, serialized in an abolitionist paper and published as a book in 1852. It sold 300,000 copies in its first year in the United States and far more abroad, and it did more than any other book to turn Northern opinion against slavery. She wrote some thirty more books, including The Minister's Wooing and Oldtown Folks.