Harriet Beecher Stowe (14 June 1811-1 July 1896), prolific novelist, is remembered today for Uncle Tom's Cabin. She was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, the daughter of the distinguished Congregational minister Lyman Beecher and Roxanna Foote. The family included eight children, among them Catharine, Isabella, and Henry Ward Beecher. When Harriet was four, her mother died. Harriet's father remarried and had three more children by his second wife, Harriet Porter. During this period Harriet and Henry Ward were closely attached. Under her father's pervasive influence, she grew up in "a kind of moral heaven, replete with moral oxygen--full charged with intellectual electricity." Much of that "moral oxygen" and "intellectual electricity" would be injected into Uncle Tom's Cabin. The guiding principles of life in the Calvinist parsonage were self-abnegation and spiritual regeneration, principles that were to filter into Harriet's writings. After five years at Miss Sarah Pierce's school in Litchfield, she attended...