American novelist, abolitionist, and the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852), the single most politically consequential novel in American history. Stowe was the daughter of the Calvinist revivalist Lyman Beecher, sister of the preacher Henry Ward Beecher, and a lifelong Connecticut-and-Cincinnati Protestant whose opposition to slavery was grounded in an evangelical theological vocabulary she never abandoned. Her decision to write Uncle Tom's Cabin was triggered by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which obliged Northerners to participate in the return of enslaved people to bondage — a law that broke the accommodationist consensus among many Northern Protestants and made Stowe's novel possible.
Serialized in the abolitionist paper The National Era in 1851–52 and published as a book in March 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin sold 300,000 copies in its first year in the United States, a million in Britain, and was translated into dozens of languages. Its central move is to insist, through the sustained novelistic representation of enslaved interior life, that enslaved people are Christian souls of full moral standing and that slavery is therefore an unambiguous sin — a claim that obvious as it seems now was precisely what Southern theology and Northern political compromise had for decades refused to concede. The book was credited, by Lincoln (who may or may not have greeted Stowe as "the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war") and by generations of American readers, with having done more than any single work to make the Civil War thinkable.
The book's legacy is now inseparable from the racial stereotypes the stage adaptations of it hardened into American popular culture — "Uncle Tom" as epithet, the "Tom shows" that toured through the late 19th century, and the long critical work of writers including Richard Wright ("Uncle Tom's Children"), Baldwin ("Everybody's Protest Novel"), and Ishmael Reed to discriminate the novel's genuine achievement from its popular distortions. Stowe's later novels (Dred, 1856; The Minister's Wooing, 1859; Oldtown Folks, 1869) are substantial books in their own right that most readers have forgotten.