Although Harriet Beecher Stowe was widely renowned as the author of the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, a story whose strong message against slavery has been heard around the world, Theodore R. Hovet asserted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography that Stowe is also known for having written "some of the finest regional novels in American literature." Still, as Millicent Lenz noted in another Dictionary of Literary Biography e ntry, Stowe's significance in literary history is largely founded upon the one novel. "Uncle Tom's Cabin is one of the few works by an American woman writer of her time still read today," wrote Lenz. Stowe, Lenz concluded, "was one of the most influential women of the Victorian Age."

Stowe's novel was credited by some observers with stirring anti-slavery feeling to such a degree that the American Civil War was inevitable. As Paul David Johnson wrote in the American Writers...