Harriet Beecher-Stowe: 
 Harriet Beecher-Stowe was one of the most famous American writers during the 1850s and the 1860s, and her book Uncle Tom's cabin is still very popular. 
Harriet was born in a priest family in Connecticut, USA, in the beginning of the 19th century. She got a strict upbringing. When she grew older she became a teacher and she also wrote some articles for the local newspapers. 
During a visit to the southern states, she made her first contact with slavery, which was very common in the south at this time. Her Christian upbringing made her hate the unfair slavery and she decided to do something about it. 
The best she could think of, was to write a book. And that's just what she did. In the year 1852 the book Uncle Tom's cabin was published. The book immediately became a best-seller, both in the USA and in Europe. The book is a touching story about the slave Tom, who is separated from his family and sold to a plantation owner.
Many slave dealers and other people who supported the slavery became very upset over the book, therefore Harriet a year later wrote A key to Uncle Tom's cabin, in which she proved her first book with concrete facts. 
When Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher-Stowe in the beginning of the American civil war, he said: "So this is the lady that started the war". Perhaps he was right. Uncle Tom's cabin was really an ignition in the northern states. Thousands of common people read the book and became negative towards slavery. 
After writing Uncle Tom's cabin, Harriet Beecher-Stowe went back to her ordinary life, writing short articles for the newspapers. However she published a few novels, for example The pearl of Orr's island (1862) and Oldtown folks (1869). 
A lot of educated men have argued in more than a century if Harriet's books and especially Uncle Tom's cabin really are good books, from a literary point of view. Whatever they say, it is a proved fact that her book ,Uncle Tom's cabin, was, and still is, incredibly popular, and that it really belongs to the great classics of books.