Harriet Beecher was born in Litchfield, Connecticut. After her mother died when Stowe was two years old, her father raised her. In 1824 she was sent to the Connecticut Female Seminary, and in 1832 she left for Cincinnati to teach at the Western Female Institute of Theology. She married Calvin Stowe in 1836 and bore five children within the next seven years. Harriet Beecher Stowe soon began to write and sell stories to supplement their income. In 1843 she published The Mayflower, a collection of stories. In 1852 Stowe published her best-known work, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book that depicts the evils of slavery. It enjoyed tremendous success, selling more than 300,000 copies in the year it was published. Abolitionists used the novel to denounce slavery. In the years following the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe continued to write novels. Between 1862 and 1884, she produced an average of one book a year. Stowe died in 1896 in Connecticut.
