The name of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) is in all likelihood not so well known as the title of her most famous work, "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Millions upon millions have read her story, both for its interest and because of its place in American history. Yet relatively few have read her other novels, and to-day those who turn to them do so not so much for their own sakes as because they contribute a minor chapter in the history of the American novel. She entered literature by the pathway of reform. "The heroic element was strong in me, having come down by ordinary generation from a long line of Puritan ancestry, and ... it made me long to do something, I knew not what: to fight for my country, or to make some declaration on my own account." Then, when the story-telling gift was developed and the reform was accomplished, she continued to hold her mirror up to nature--a kind of Claude Lorraine glass with a strong tint of moralistic blue in it. She was born in 1811 at Litchfield, Connecticut, one of the five children of the Reverend Lyman Beecher by his first marriage. Her famous brother, Henry Ward Beecher, was two years younger. The death of her mother when she was but four years old resulted in her having a succession of homes during girlhood: first with an aunt, then for some years under her father's roof after his remarriage in 1817, and next from 1824 to 1832 with her older sister, Catherine, who had established a school in Hartford. In all these experiences she lived under kindly protection and in somewhat literary surroundings, and in all of them she breathed an atmosphere which was heavy with the exhalations of the old-school Calvinistic theology. In 1832, when Harriet was twenty-one years old, her father, after a six-year pastorate of a Boston church, went to Cincinnati as president of the Lane Theological Seminary, and the two sisters joined him there. This move into what was then the Far West was not, however, a banishment into the wilds, for Cincinnati was in those days a sort of outpost of Eastern culture. The Ohio River, which flowed by its doors, served as the great highway from the East to the Mississippi Valley. The city attracted early travelers like Mrs. Trollope and Harriet Martineau as visitors, and stimulated them to ungracious comment, which was offset by longer or shorter residence of a distinguished succession of Massachusetts men. There were literary clubs, good and prolific publishing houses, and, in the _Western Monthly_, the beginning of a succession of magazines. Catherine wrote back from an advance trip of inspection: I have become somewhat acquainted with those ladies we shall have most to do with, and find them intelligent, New England sort of folks. Indeed, this is a New England city in all its habits, and its inhabitants are more than half from New England.... I know of no place in the world where there is so fair a prospect of finding everything that makes social and domestic life pleasant.