Orr's Island, located on the coast of Maine in the town of Harpswell, is the setting for Harriet Beecher Stowe's heart-warming fictional account of the people who lived there. Stowe based her thrifty, honest, practical, and God-fearing characters on real Mainers she knew while she and her husband, who was a teacher at Bowdoin College, lived in Brunswick, Maine. She also wrote her most famous book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, in their Brunswick home.

This volume of essays and short stories by Harriet Beecher Stowe was written under the pseudonym Christopher Crowfield. As with many women of her time, Stowe took on a male pseudonym in order to make her work more acceptable to male dominated literary outlets, such as the Atlantic Monthly, where these works were originally published. Focusing on the domestic American household of the 1860s, the short pieces comment on the changes wrought by the Civil War. The wartime economic boom brought inexpensive consumer goods to more households. What was once a homey, comfortable parlor, the center of...

Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, wrote this 1869 novel with the intent of describing a New England village's life and character in the years after the Revolutionary War, before the advent of industrialization. Said Stowe, in the voice of the novel's 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,...

Uncle Tom's Cabin: Harriett Beecher Stowe is a woman who hated slavery and all its ugliness. President Lincoln is believed to have said, upon meeting Mrs. Stowe, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war " Her powerful character development makes the stories of the slaves all the more heart-wrenching. It was published in 1852, and served as a much-needed national chastisement over the practice of slavery in the south and also the prejudice against black people in the north. In places the book is dated and it makes the modern reader cringe, but overall it is...