Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of Harriet (Elizabeth) Beecher Stowe, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 2747 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

An absolute delight
A funny, marvelous tale of an empty-headed, gold digging girl and the unfortunate man she marries. Try to find an edition with the original ink drawings, which add much to the period flavor. Those familiar with Stoweonly from Uncle Tom's Cabin will be amazed by her talent as a lighthumorist. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.Download Description
Uncle Tom felt more unhappy than ever. He had hoped at least to have a little room which he could keep clean and tidy. But this hole he did not even have to himself. He had to share it with five or six others. ... Read more

Book Description
While best known for the immensely popular and controversial novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe is also the author of an extensive body of additional work on American culture and politics. Playing many roles--journalist, pamphleteer, novelist, preacher, and advisor on domestic affairs--Stowe used the written word as a vehicle for religious, social, and political commentaries, often leavening them with entertainment in order to reach a broad audience. She had a profound effect on American culture, not because her ideas were unique, but because they were common. What made her so radical was that she insisted on putting her ideas into action.The Oxford Harriet Beecher Stowe Reader offers a focused collection of Stowe's writings from the 1830s through the 1860s. Illustrating her broad range, rhetorical strategies, and cultural designs on the world, it is ideal for courses in nineteenth-century American literature, women's literature, and American history. The volume collects those selections best suited for classroom use, reprinting many pieces here for the first time. Editor Joan D. Hedrick provides a substantial introduction that assesses Stowe's vital impact on nineteenth-century American literature, politics, and culture. The readings are divided into three sections: Early Sketches, Antislavery Writings, and Domestic Culture and Politics. Early Sketches presents the finest writing of Stowe's literary apprenticeship. Antislavery Writings includes Uncle Tom's Cabin in its entirety, placing it in the context of Stowe's considerable and often-overlooked body of other antislavery writings. This section also includes a generous selection from A Key To Uncle Tom's Cabin, a companion volume to the novel. Domestic Culture and Politics shows the scope of Stowe's thinking on the Victorian home, for which she was a major propagandist. The inclusion here of "The True Story of Lady Byron's Life," an expose of male debauchery and incest at the core of a nineteenth-century home, represents Stowe's willingness to tackle the most challenging political and social issues of her time. ... Read more

Book Description
This Companion provides fresh perspectives on the frequently read classic Uncle Tom's Cabin as well as on topics of perennial interest, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's representation of race, her attitude to reform, and her relationship to the American novel. Cindy Weinstein comprehensively investigates Stowe's impact on the American literary tradition and the novel of social change. ... Read more

Amazon.com
Harriet Beecher Stowe, daughter of a preacher, married to a poor Biblical scholar, and mother of nine, had the early good fortune of an education at a school founded by her feminist older sister. To help support her family, Stowe began to write. In 1851, born of evangelical outrage against slavery, her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin made her famous. Today the very name conveys white paternalism and black passivity, but Hedrick points out that this unfairly ignores the "freedom narrative" ofa book that had an electrifying effect on the abolitionist cause. When Abraham Lincoln met Stowe in 1862 he joked, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war." Hedrick's illuminating biography of this remarkable woman won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize.Book Description
"Up to this year I have always felt that I had no particular call to meddle with this subject....But I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak." Thus did Harriet Beecher Stowe announce her decision to begin work on what would become one of the most influential novels ever written. The subject she had hesitated to "meddle with" was slavery, and the novel, of course, was Uncle Tom's Cabin.Still debated today for its portrayal of African Americans and its unresolved place in the literary canon, Stowe's best-known work was first published in weekly installments from June 5, 1851 to April 1, 1852. It caused such a stir in both the North and South, and even in Great Britain, that when Stowe met President Lincoln in 1862 he is said to have greeted her with the words, "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that created this great war!"In this landmark book, the first full-scale biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe in over fifty years, Joan D. Hedrick tells the absorbing story of this gifted, complex, and contradictory woman. Hedrick takes readers into the multilayered world of nineteenth century morals and mores, exploring the influence of then-popular ideas of "true womanhood" on Stowe's upbringing as a member of the outspoken Beecher clan, and her eventful life as a writer and shaper of public opinion who was also a mother of seven. It offers a lively record of the flourishing parlor societies that launched and sustained Stowe throughout the 44 years of her career, and the harsh physical realities that governed so many women's lives. The epidemics, high infant mortality, and often disastrous medical practices of the day are portrayed in moving detail, against the backdrop of western expansion, and the great social upheaval accompanying the abolitionist movement and the entry of women into public life. Here are Stowe's public triumphs, both before and after the Civil War, and the private tragedies that included the death of her adored eighteen month old son, the drowning of another son, and the alcohol and morphine addictions of two of her other children. The daughter, sister, and wife of prominent ministers, Stowe channeled her anguish and her ambition into a socially acceptable anger on behalf of others, transforming her private experience into powerful narratives that moved a nation. Magisterial in its breadth and rich in detail, this definitive portrait explores the full measure of Harriet Beecher Stowe's life, and her contribution to American literature.Perceptive and engaging, it illuminates the career of a major writer during the transition of literature from an amatuer pastime to a profession, and offers a fascinating look at the pains, pleasures, and accomplishments of women's lives in the last century. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

A Wonderful Biography, A Wonderful History
I'm very glad that some of the negative reviews didn't put me off this book. It is not only a wonderful biography of the life of this great author, but it is an excellent history of so much of the 19th century. Mind you, it's not light, summertime reading. I liked to read a chapter a night, because there was so much to savor and think about. I learned a tremendous amount about life in that time, (how did any of our ancestors survive long enough to bring us into the world?), and about everything from the anti-slavery movement, to women's rights, to the religious fervor of the day. It provided a comprehensive look at the development of a nation and a national character.

Of course, the centerpiece of it all is Mrs. Stowe, and she really came alive for me. The author makes good use of letters, so Mrs. Stowe, her family and friends can speak for themselves. And what a family it was! The famous Beecher clan in all its glory! Through the development of Mrs. Stowe's writing, we also see a change in how literature was viewed. From "Parlor Literature" which led to "Uncle Tom's Cabin" being read by all classes, it eventually became divided into high-class versus popular...what was critically acclaimed as opposed to what the people liked. It's a division that persists to this day, and led to Mrs. Stowe's masterpiece eventually being devalued as just melodramatic women's writing.

I think this is a first-class biography and history. There's a reason why it won the Pulitzer Prize for biography. It will stand as the definitive biography of a great author and a great lady.

Highly recommend
This is an excellent scholarly biography of Stowe, wonderfully researched and clearly written.Hedrick quotes generously from Stowe's letters, so the reader gets a feel for her voice and those of her family members.She puts Stowe's life in context beautifully, so besides being a great biography, it's also an excellent source on 19th-century millenialist, abolition, and suffrage movements and on the case of women writers & canon formation. Anyone who has read and liked Mary Kelly's Private Woman, Public Stage will like this book, too.
My only complaint is that the end rushes in -- Hedrick covers something like 14 years in the last chapter.Granted much of this time Stowe seemed to be developing Alzheimer's, but I would have liked a bit more detail.What was she doing in her lucid periods?What was her feminist sister Isabella doing and how did Stowe's youngest ne'er-do-well son go from a ship's boy to a Harvard student? These are quibbles, though.In fact, one of the things I most like about this book is that Hedrick doesn't supply information when there isn't any to be found.There's very little speculation here, no inappropriately imagined scenes, no "Stowe must have thought" or "Stowe must have done."For Hedrick, either it happened or it didnt; she knows the difference between a biography and a novel.

A disrespectul, voluminous account of an amazing woman
This biography was exhausting to read.The author painted a bleak, even disrespectul picture of this truly unique woman.There must be a better biography of this great woman!This book is not worth the time it takes to read it, which is a considerable amount given its enormous size!I do not recommend this biography in the least.Very disappointed with the author's approach to her subject.

Informative, but it could have been so much better written
While, this book was informative, it was a chore to read. While chronological, it seemed disjointed and was difficult to finish. I couldn't believe this book won some sort of award and only slogged through it because it was a gift from someone who met the author at a wedding. ... Read more