Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Beecher Preachers - Softcover

Acclaimed biographer, Jean Fritz, was born in China to American missionaries on November 16, 1915. Living there until she was almost thirteen sparked a lifelong interest in American history.  She wrote about her childhood in China in Homesick, My Own Story, a Newbery Honor Book and winner of the National Book Award.
     Ms. Fritz was the author of forty-five books for children and young people. Many center on historical American figures, gaining her a reputation as the premier author of biographies for children and young people.
     Among the other prestigious awards Ms. Fritz has garnered are: the National Humanities Medal, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, the May Hill Arbuthnot Lecture Award. the Christopher Award, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Non-Fiction Award, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and many ALA Notable Books of the Year, School Library Journal Best Books of the Year, and ALA Booklist Editors’ Choice Awards.
     She passed away on May 14, 2017.

Gr. 5-9. Uncle Tom's Cabin was America's first protest novel, "the first book written against a law" and a runaway best-seller in its time. This biography is less about Stowe's famous book than it is about her life and times as a woman in an eminent family in the mid-nineteenth century. Fritz writes with verve and wit, admiring but never fulsome, creating a sense of her subject's complicated personality. We feel the young woman's ongoing struggle between her domestic and public roles (Would she seem "unwomanly" writing about politics? Would she embarrass her brothers?), and we see how she changed her definition of the feminine role, telling women that in a time of slavery, it was no longer appropriate for them to be silent and "genteel." Fritz writes with quiet irony about the extremes of this bossy, preachy family ("Like all the Beechers, she enjoyed telling people what to do"). The research is unobtrusive; in fact, although there's a bibliography, it's frustrating at times to have no source notes. How can we find out more about particular incidents? Where can we read about Stowe's legendary interview with Lincoln, for example? Many kids will be stimulated to go on from here to find out more about the famous novel; how it was read then, the controversy surrounding it now, especially with regard to the caricature of Uncle Tom. Fritz quietly dramatizes a momentous truth: this woman wrote a book that, for all its flaws, changed the world. Hazel Rochman