Harriet Beecher Stowe Biography

Harriet Beecher Stowe was born Harriet Beecher in Litchfield, Connecticut on June 14, 1911 to Lyman Beecher and Roxanna Foote. She was one of eleven children, to be precise the sixth child, though not all of her siblings were of the same mother. In 1915, at the age of four, Harriet lost her mother due to an illness, the trauma of the loss stayed with her and even influenced her later writings. After the loss she was taken by her Aunt Harriet Foote to her Grandmother's home in Nut Plains. She stayed there for a few months during the winter of that year where she already started to display a literary mind with developing the ability to read and memorize whole passages from the Bible. Her father, a reverend and conservative abolitionist, soon remarried to Harriet Porter when Harriet was six years old. She described her stepmother as a fair, delicate looking creature that was also as she described "of a type noble but severe, naturally hard, correct, exact and exacting, with intense natural and moral ideality" (Stowe, p. 13). Her stepmother although kind, was a little flustered by inheriting eight new children and maintained some distance from them, focusing more on her own children, Harriet's half-siblings.

Once Harriet was of age to attend school she started going to Litchfield Academy and soon was one of the top students. Always trying to impress her father she would later tell others that the proudest moment in her life occurred when she was twelve and her father visited the school, it was there that he heard an essay which he found exemplary. He inquired about which student had written it and when told that it was his own daughter's he praised her highly. (Stowe, p. 14) Soon after Harriet's eldest sister Charlotte, her senior ...

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... to the opposition and view of the book for being overly dramatic and exaggerated. (Weinstein, p. 17) Her name remained tarnished even into the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s when it was proclaimed by one writer, James Baldwin, that the story had helped ingrain racism into the white American culture. Not until the 1970s did the name Harriet Beecher Stowe regain positive recognition with the rise of the feminist movement. These second wave feminists worked to get the book into schools and to give recognition to positive female role models throughout American history. Her writings on slavery and their impact on the United States during its tumultuous time of deciding on its moral stance on slavery was great and has been immortalized in our history as Harriet Beecher Stowe's legacy has survived even into the 21st century, being taught in schools across the country.