Harriet Beecher Stowe

The New England writer whose novel did what tracts and speeches could not: it made a nation feel the cruelty of slavery in its own parlors. Uncle Tom's Cabin sold in numbers without precedent and turned readers into abolitionists by the hundreds of thousands. The story that Lincoln greeted her as the little lady who made this great war is probably apocryphal. That people believed it, and still do, measures the book's force.