Little Hattie was the youngest girl in a large and most unusual family. Her father, Dr. Lyman Beecher, was a learned, absentminded and somewhat eccentric minister in Litchfield, Connecticut. When the Beecher family started off to church every Sunday morning, with Trip the dog bringing up the end of the procession of eight children, Mrs. Beecher sometimes doubted if they would all ever get there! It was hard to keep Father from giving his Sunday clothes away to beggars. It was hard to find his hat and coat and sermon when the church bells began ringing. It was hard to keep him away from the fishing pole he kept near the trout stream. But in spite of all distractions Dr. Beecher usually reached his pulpit in the nick of time. And his sons and daughters usually learned something from his observations along the way.

From the very beginning Hattie was the most imaginative one of the family. She loved to read and to make up stories of her own. Little Henry Ward and baby Charlie were her special audience. What fun they had acting out Hattie's tales! And the games she thought of! But all the brothers and sisters said that when there was an unpleasant family task to be done, like stacking wood the parishioners brought every fall, or peeling fruit for apple butter, Hattie's tales made the work go faster. Her older sisters talked about teaching school or getting married when they grew up. Hattie meant to do those things too, but she wanted something else as well — she wanted to be an author.

The idea first came when she went with Henry Ward to the dame school kept by Widow Kilbourne. Hattie loved her reader — but the geography book was so dull! Yet it was one of the most fascinating subjects in the world. Sometime she would write an interesting geography book. Didn't her teacher in the academy say her compositions were the best in the class? Hadn't she won a prize in the school's essay contest?

Hattie did, of course, grow up to write her geography book, though she was still so young when it was published that it came out under her older sister's name — but to the world her name means another book — one of the best-known stories of American literature. Everyone has heard of its famous characters — the patient slave Uncle Tom, little Eva and Topsy, and the brutal overseer Simon Legree. It was a book that helped change the course of history and bring freedom to a whole race, a book written against the system of slavery, not against the people of the South. Harriet had as many friends in the South whom she loved and admired as in the North.

In this story about the childhood of a little Connecticut girl, Mrs. Widdemer suggests how memories, characters and ideas blend in a writer's work, how experiences might have come to Harriet and eventually into her great story, as well as the principles of love and brotherhood and justice that shaped her book and her own character.

Mabel Cleland Widdemer has already contributed to the Childhood of Famous Americans Series two delightful volumes: Washington Irving: Boy of Old New York and Aleck Bell: Ingenious Boy. Now in another interesting story she introduces another interesting American child: Harriet Beecher Stowe, the little girl who grew up to be a woman of tremendous influence.

From the dust jacket