Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Elisabeth Beecher Stowe was born June 14, 1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut, the seventh of nine children of Roxanna (Foote) and Rev. Dr. Lyman Beecher, a well-known Calvinist preacher. Beecher was one of the leaders of the Second Awakening, a Christian revival movement that also inspired social activism—he preached against slavery in the 1820s in response to the Missouri Compromise. ... In 1836, Harriet married widowed clergyman Calvin Ellis Stowe, a professor at her father’s theological seminary. Calvin, active in public education, was very supportive of her writing and her involvement in public affairs. In 1834, Harriet won a writing contest in the Western Monthly Magazine and began writing articles, essays, and stories for it and, over the course of her life-long writing career, other publications including The Atlantic Monthly, New York Evangelist, the Independent, and the Christian Union. In a letter in 1853, she explained, "... as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity – because as a lover of my county, I trembled at the coming day of wrath."