Harriet Beecher Stowe

Stowe grew up in a family of preachers (her father Lyman Beecher and brother Henry Ward Beecher were among the era's most famous clergymen) and settled in Cincinnati, just across the river from slaveholding Kentucky, where she encountered fugitive slaves and their stories firsthand. The death of her infant son to cholera in 1849 deepened her identification with enslaved mothers whose children were sold from them.

Uncle Tom's Cabin ran as a newspaper serial in 1851 and 1852 before appearing as a book that outsold everything in America except the Bible, converting huge numbers of previously indifferent Northern readers to the antislavery cause. Southern critics and slaveholders attacked it so fiercely that she published A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, documenting the real cases behind her fiction.

She went on to write dozens more books and travel widely, including a lecture tour of England, remaining a public figure on abolition and women's causes until her death in 1896.