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Harriet Beecher Stowe was born into a prominent, religious, Calvinist family in Litchfield, Connecticut on 14 June 1811. She married a seminary professor, Calvin Ellis Stowe, and had seven children, several of whom died during childhood. 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', her first novel, was published in 1852 and provoked, to Mrs. Stowe's satisfaction, an intense and undeniable reaction -- at home and abroad -- against American slavery. She wrote many more novels, none of them as famous or important as her first, the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century. She eventually rejected strenuously the Calvinist teachings of her youth, replacing them with a more merciful and forgiving religious philosophy.