Category: Authors

Breast Cancer Awareness Month Biography Born into a wealthy and intellectually active family – sister of novelist Henry James and psychologist and philosopher William James – Alice James soon developed the psychological and physical problems that would end her life at age 43. Alice never married and lived with her parents until their deaths. She is known mainly for the diary she kept in her final years. Alice James was born August 7, 1848 in New York, the only daughter of Henry James, Sr. and Mary Robertson Walsh James. Henry James, Sr. had high hopes for his four sons, but his only expectation for Alice was that she stay at home and be a companion to her parents until she…

British-American Actress and Abolitionist Fanny Kemble (1809-1893) was a famous British actress prior to her marriage to slaveholder Pierce Mease Butler, grandson of Founding Father Pierce Butler. She was an independent and highly intelligent woman who set out on a two-year theatrical tour in America in 1832. Kemble had no idea how much her life would be affected by the institution of slavery. Image: Fanny Kemble in 1834 By Thomas Sully Frances Anne Kemble was born on November 27, 1809, in London, England. From one of England’s most prominent family of actors, her aunt was noted actress Sarah Siddons and her father, Charles Kemble, the renowned Shakespearean actor. Due to the financial trouble of her father’s Covent Garden Theatre in…

American Abolitionist and Author Harriet Beecher Stowe was an abolitionist and author. Her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was a depiction of life for African American slaves in the mid-nineteenth century, which energized anti-slavery forces in the North, while provoking widespread anger in the South. She wrote more than 20 books, and was influential both for her writings and her public stands on social issues of the day. Harriet Elisabeth Beecher was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, on June 14, 1811. She was the second daughter the sixth of eleven children born to outspoken religious leader Lyman Beecher and Roxanna Foote Beecher, who died when Stowe was only four years old. Harriet’s oldest sister, Catherine Beecher, then took over care of…

Author, Poet and Confederate Heroine Mary Ann Harris Gay was born March 1829 in Jones County, Georgia. Her father was William Gay and her mother was the former Mary Stevens. William Gay descended from Virginians who migrated through the Carolinas to Georgia. He died within a year or so after his daughter’s birth. In 1833, Mary’s mother married Decatur lawyer Joseph Stokes, and the family moved to Cassville on the northwestern frontier of Georgia. Her mother gave birth to two more children, and was widowed again. In April 1840, Mary’s grandfather Thomas Stevens died, leaving part of his estate to Mary Gay’s mother, with the stipulation that money be held in trust from the sale of certain Twiggs County land…

American Author and Civil War Nurse Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania on November 29, 1832, the second daughter of Abigail May, women’s suffrage and abolitionist advocate, and Bronson Alcott, philosopher and education reformer. Louisa and her three sisters, Anna, Elizabeth, and May were educated by their father, and spent their childhood in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts. When Louisa was 10, Bronson enlisted the family in an experiment in communal living on a tract he named Fruitlands, because of its orchard. Six months of Transcendental agriculture left the Alcotts destitute, Bronson suicidal, and the Alcott marriage on the verge of dissolution. A distressed Louisa recorded it all in her childhood diary. At age 15, troubled by the poverty…