Philip McFarland

This is the home page of Philip McFarland. To the right is my most recent book, which Grove Press published late in 2007. (Clicking on the blue title under the dust jacket will take you to the Amazon listing and customer reviews.) If you click on the FICTION link above, you'll learn something about my personal and professional life—none of that fictional—and a bit more about the two novels I've written, arranged in order of composition. One was published when I was thirty, which goes back a way, and the second in 1984. By clicking on the NONFICTION link above, you'll find, arranged with the most recent one first in the center column and proceeding from there down and to the narrower column on the right from top to bottom, a listing and description of the nonfiction works I've written. Those descend in time from this most recent book on Harriet Beecher Stowe, of 2007, to the book on Washington Irving, which was published in 1979.

Thanks for your interest in my work.

"Philip McFarland has written an absorbing biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe's passions—for husband, family, friends, and above all for her work. Stowe lived large, loved powerfully, and wrote to change the course of history." —Megan Marshall, author of THE PEABODY SISTERS: THREE WOMEN WHO IGNITED AMERICAN ROMANTICISM

"Often dismissed even by her admirers as a pious faculty wife who just happened to write the book of the century, Harriet Beecher Stowe emerges in Philip McFarland's biography in all her complexity and genius. In an age of bloated biographies, it is a pleasure to find a writer who can distill a copiously documented life into such supple and succinct prose." —Charles C. Calhoun, author of LONGFELLOW; A RECONSIDERED LIFE

And reviewing the book in the BOSTON GLOBE, Patricia Hill, professor of history and American studies at Wesleyan, describes Philip McFarland as "a wonderful storyteller," and LOVES OF HARRIET BEECHER STOWE as relating "the adventures and misadventures of Stowe and selected members of her remarkable family" in an account "spiced with choice selections from the voluminous family correspondence that offer an almost voyeuristic pleasure. Ostensibly the story of one woman, the narrative paints, with broad strokes and graphic details, a history of the United States in the 19th century."

"Harriet Beecher Stowe is one of the great heroines of American history, and Philip McFarland brings her to life in all her glory, in a book at once so dramatic and so subtle that it rivals the best fiction." —Debby Applegate, Pulitzer Prize winner for THE MOST FAMOUS MAN IN AMERICA, about Mrs. Stowe's brother Henry Ward Beecher.