Philip McFarland

The biographer son of the author of UNCLE TOM'S CABIN wrote of his mother: "She was impelled by love, and did what she did, and wrote what she did, under the impulse of love." "I love everybody," Harriet Beecher Stowe once told a friend. But Stowe felt hatred for the foul stain of slavery, and hatred for the free-love advocate Victoria Woodhull, and hatred even for the poet Byron, as a husband who abused a woman whom Mrs. Stowe deeply loved. For love was Stowe's lifelong theme: of her Savior, of her husband, of her children, of her sisters and brothers, of the exalted Lady Byron and the humble black people alongside whom she worked through a lifetime. LOVES OF HARRIET BEECHER STOWE describes that amazing lifetime, the woman who lived it, and the fascinating people it was lived among.

HAWTHORNE IN CONCORD is a narrative of Nathanel Hawthorne's years in Concord, Massachusetts, from his wedding day in 1842 to his death in 1864. "The whole cast of luminous characters is here," writes Bernard Bailyn, "their lives, loves, and comings and goings, not just as minds but as people—Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Margaret Fuller, Horace Mann, the Alcotts, the Peabodies—all circling around the central figures of Hawthorne and his wife. It's a fine, readable book of biography and cultural history." David Herbert Donald concluded: "I don't know when I have read a book as satisfying as HAWTHORNE IN CONCORD. Not since Van Wyck Brooks's THE FLOWERING OF NEW ENGLAND has anyone else so perfectly re-created the world of the New England Renaissance." And for Pulitzer prizewinner Elizabeth Frank, "HAWTHORNE IN CONCORD probes, with exquisite insight, the close and intricate relations of the most gifted circle of writers America has ever had. It is a beautiful, indispensable and quietly stunning piece of work."

THE BRAVE BOSTONIANS provides a stirring account of the year leading up to the American Revolution, from the perspective of three intertwined lives: the Loyalist Thomas Hutchinson, the Diplomat Benjamin Franklin, and the Patriot Josiah Quincy. Robert Middlekauff, author of BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AND HIS ENEMIES, adjudges it to be "an excellent work that deserves to have a wide readership. It is interesting, thoughtful, and well-written." Justin Kaplan found the account "an exciting story told with stylistic sureness, narrative pacing, and a firm command of the materials. It dramatizes the human and personal transactions that helped drive a great historical event." And according to Pauline Maier, author of AMERICAN SCRIPTURE, "THE BRAVE BOSTONIANS tells with great vividness and human detail the story of how, in 1774 and 1775, England and America moved, step by step, toward a war that neither wanted. It provides a gripping introduction to the American Revolution for anyone anxious to know more about that event."