Pulitzer Prize Biography Winner

Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life

by Joan D. Hedrick

Summary

Joan D. Hedrick examines the life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the writer whose novel Uncle Tom's Cabin galvanized antislavery sentiment before the Civil War. The biography situates Stowe within her remarkable family of preachers and reformers and explores how domestic life and faith shaped her work. It restores attention to a woman whose fiction carried enormous political force in nineteenth century America.

Historical Context & Significance

Hedrick's was the first full scholarly biography of Stowe in decades when it won the Pulitzer in 1995.