Harriet Beecher Stowe (redirected from Harriet Elizabeth Stowe)

Stowe, Harriet Beecher 

Born June 14, 1811, in Litchfield, Conn.; died July 1, 1896, in Florida. American Writer.

Stowe was the daughter of a minister and the wife of a professor of theology. In the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin(1852), which became world-famous, she was the first to show the inhumanity of slavery in America. Although Stowe did not go beyond the idea of the reconciliation of the slaves with the slaveholders, her work played a prominent role in the ideological preparation for the abolition of slavery in the USA. In the book A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853), Stowe published documents about the cruelty of slaveholders. In the novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), which showed the impossibility of resolving the problem of Negro slavery through reform, Stowe also anticipated a revolutionary resolution of this question.

In Russia revolutionary democratic circles used Stowe’s novel in the struggle against serfdom. (In 1858 the editors of the journal Sovremennik distributed a Russian translation of the novel to readers as an appendix to the journal.) Under Soviet power Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been reprinted 59 times in 21 languages of the peoples of the USSR. The novel has a general circulation of more than 2 million copies.

WORKS

The Writings, vols. 1–16. Cambridge, 1896.
In Russian translation:
Khizhina diadi Toma. Moscow, 1961.

REFERENCES

Istoriia amerikanskoi literatury, vol. 1. Moscow-Leningrad, 1947. Sysoeva, E. A. Zhizn’ Garriet Bicher-Stou, 2nd ed. St. Petersburg, 1900.
Boreham, F. W. The Gospel of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. London, 1956. Adams, J. R. Harriet Beecher Stowe. New York, 1963. (Bibliography, pp. 143–67.)