Loves of Harriet Beecher Stowe

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Open Road + Grove/Atlantic, Nov 18, 2008 - Biography & Autobiography - 336 pages
The author of Hawthorne in Concord “brings [Stowe] to life in all her glory, in a book at once so dramatic and so subtle that it rivals the best fiction” (Debby Applegate, author of The Most Famous Man in America).
 
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin forced an ambivalent North to confront the atrocities of slavery, yet it was just one of many accomplishments of the Beechers, the most eminent American family of the nineteenth century.
 
Historian Philip McFarland follows the Beecher clan to the boomtown of Cincinnati, where Harriet’s glimpses of slavery across the Kentucky border moved her to pen Uncle Tom’s Cabin. We meet Harriet’s loves: her father Lyman, her husband Calvin, and her brother Henry, the most famous preacher of his time. As McFarland leads us through Harriet’s ever-changing world, he traces the arc of her literary career from her hard-scrabble beginnings to her ascendancy as the most renowned author of her day.
 
Through the portrait of a defining American family, Loves of Harriet Beecher Stowe opens into an unforgettable rendering of mid-nineteenth century America in the midst of unprecedented social and demographic explosions. To this day, Uncle Tom’s Cabin reverberates as a crucial document in Western culture.
 
“Often dismissed even by her admirers as a pious faculty wife who just happened to write the book of the century, Harriet Beecher Stowe emerges in Philip McFarland’s biography in all her complexity and genius.” —Charles Calhoun, author of Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life and The Gilded Age

From inside the book

Contents

Civil War
157
Postbellum
167
A Vindication
177
Aftermath
187
henry
195
The Beechers
197
Religion
206
Brooklyn
215

Reception
83
Dark Places
91
lyman
99
To England
101
Culture
112
Looking Back
121
Return to Europe
131
Heartbreak
140
The Ministers Wooing
149
Changing America
225
My Wife and I
235
Scandal
245
Inside the Home
254
Trial
263
Late Years
274
notes
293
works cited
315
Copyright

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About the author (2008)

Philip McFarland was educated at Oberlin College and Cambridge University. He is the author of four books of nonfiction, including Hawthorne in Concord. He lives in Massachusetts.

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