(Harriet Beecher Stowe's second antislavery novel was writ...)
Harriet Beecher Stowe's second antislavery novel was written partly in response to the criticisms of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by both white Southerners and black abolitionists. In Dred (1856), Stowe attempts to explore the issue of slavery from an African American perspective.
Through the compelling stories of Nina Gordon, the mistress of a slave plantation, and Dred, a black revolutionary, Stowe brings to life conflicting beliefs about race, the institution of slavery, and the possibilities of violent resistance. Probing the political and spiritual goals that fuel Dred's rebellion, Stowe creates a figure far different from the acquiescent Christian martyr Uncle Tom.
In his introduction to the classic novel, Robert S. Levine outlines the antislavery debates in which Stowe had become deeply involved before and during her writing of Dred. Levine shows that in addition to its significance in literary history, the novel remains relevant to present-day discussions of cross-racial perspectives.
(This Townsend Library classic has been carefully edited t...)
This Townsend Library classic has been carefully edited to be more accessible to today's students. It includes a background note about the book, an author's biography, and a lively afterword. Acclaimed by educators nationwide, the Townsend Library is helping millions of young adults discover the pleasure and power of reading.
(The Pearl of Orrs Island, A Story of the Coast of Maine ...)
The Pearl of Orrs Island, A Story of the Coast of Maine was first published in 1862 by Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin". Harriet Beecher Stowe is one of those authors who wrote numerous volumes, but struck it so big with one title that the others were forgotten. This 1862 novel follows a young girl's life on the raw New England coast populated by sea folk and her struggles to fit in. The rural tranquility of the lonely, pine-girthed shores of the Maine coast is the setting for this beautiful novel of conflicting aspirations written by one of the most prolific and influential writers in American history. Here is the heartwarming story of a young girl's struggle to belong and fit in, in the face of adversity, and of her upbringing among strong women, grumpy fishermen, annoying gossips, sea captains, and the dreamlike, tempestuous landscape of Orr's Island. THE PEARL OF ORR'S ISLAND is one of the forgotten -- but not lost -- masterpieces of American literature. It reflects Harriet Beecher Stowe's awareness of the complexity of small-town society, her commitment to realism, and her fluency in the local language.
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Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Toms Cabin, wro...)
Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Toms Cabin, wrote this 1869 novel with the intent of describing a New England villages life and character in the years after the Revolutionary War, before the advent of industrialization. Said Stowe, in the voice of the novels narrator Horace Holyoke, I would endeavor to show you New England in its seed-bed, before the hot suns of modern progress had developed its sprouting germs into the great trees of today. She based some of the book on the childhood memories of her husband, Calvin Ellis Stowe, and the residents of his birthplace, Natick, Massachusetts.
Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe was an American writer and philanthropist, the author of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which contributed so much to popular feeling against slavery that it is cited among the causes of the American Civil War.
Background
Harriet Elizabeth "Hattie" Beecher was born on June 14, 1811 in Litchfield, Connecticut, into a family of powerful and very demanding individuals. Her father, Lyman Beecher, was a fiery, evangelical Calvinist. Her mother, Roxana Foote Beecher, died when she was 4, leaving a legacy of quiet gentleness and a brother - the Beecher children's uncle Samuel Foote. Uncle Sam, retired sea captain, brought a measure of warm tolerance which might otherwise have been absent.
In October 1832 the family moved to Cincinnati, where the elder Beecher became director of the Lane Theological Seminary and where his older daughter, Catherine, opened her Western Female Institute.
Education
Harriet was taught at Western Female Institute.
Career
In 1834 Harriet began writing for the Western Monthly Magazine and was awarded a $50 prize for her tale "A New England Sketch. " Her writing during the next 16 years was to be sketchy. After her marriage she did, however, have the opportunity to visit the South, and she observed with particular attention the operation of the slave system there. The atmosphere at the Lane Seminary was abolitionist in the extreme, but Harriet herself did not at that time espouse this position.
In 1849 Stowe published her first volume, The Mayflower, a slender book but one which convinced her husband that she should aspire seriously to a literary career. In 1850 Calvin Stowe was called to a chair at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. She then set about writing Uncle Tom's Cabin, which first appeared in serial form in 1851-1852 in the National Era, a Washington, D. C. , antislavery newspaper. The book was published in 1852 in a two-volume edition by the house of John P. Jewett and sold 300, 000 copies in its first year – 10, 000 in the first week. During the first 5 years of its publication, the book sold half a million copies in America alone.
Though Uncle Tom's Cabin was received with wild attention, its reception was (except for the abolitionist press) almost uniformly hostile. Not only in the South, where each newspaper was a sea of fury, but also in the North there were universal charges that the world of the slave had been melodramatically misrepresented. The action of the book traced the passage of the slave Uncle Tom through the hands of three owners, each meant to represent a type of Southern figure. The first was a benevolent planter, the second a highbred gentleman, and the last the infamous Simon Legree, who caused the death of Uncle Tom. The fortunes of the slaves in the book curved downward, and the finally successful dash for freedom taken by George and Eliza constituted the high drama of the book. But the overall treatment of slave and master revealed something far more complex than an abolitionist tract: the high, eloquent style contained much that was warmly, even fiercely sympathetic to the world of the old South.
Stowe answered her critics in 1853 with A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, a book designed to document the facts of the novel, but she also responded to her success by traveling widely, receiving in England and on the Continent a perfect wave of acclamation. In 1856 she published her novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. This, too, was a slave novel, and its reception was hardly less enthusiastic than that of Uncle Tom's Cabin. In England alone, during the first month, over 100, 000 copies were sold. Although Stowe then turned to a less didactic dimension, producing a series of novels based on New England and drawing heavily on local color, her reputation for years to come was connected with the didactic power of her first two novels.
In 1869 Stowe again toured Europe, renewing an earlier friendship with Lord Byron's widow. As a result, the novelist published Lady Byron Vindicated (1870), charging the dead poet with having so violated his marriage vows as to have had an incestuous relationship with his sister. Byron was a legend by this time, and the charges resulted in alienating much of Stowe's hitherto loyal British audience. Undisturbed, however, she continued her series of novels, poems, and sketches, as well as her autobiography, never wanting for a devoted and enthusiastic American audience. The later years of her life were spent, in large part, in Florida, where she and her husband tried, with only moderate success, to manage the income from her literary activities. Stowe died in Hartford, Connecticut, on July 1, 1896.
On January 6, 1836 Beecher married Calvin Ellis Stowe, a professor in the Lane Seminary, and they had seven children during a period of financial hardship. They had their last child in Brunswick, Maine.