HARRIET BEECHER STOWE began her writing career by writing pieces for magazines to compliment her husbands' meager salary as a professor. She won a short story prize from Western Monthly Magazine, and in 1834, her short-story collection The Mayflower was published. At this time, Stowe was living in Cincinnati, Ohio, which was just across the river from the slave trade and gave her the impetus to write Uncle Tom's Cabin. In 1850, the family movied to Boston at the height of the public furor over the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, which mandated the return of runaway slaves already in the North to their owners. Stowe set about writing a novel illustrating the moral responsibility of the entire nation for the cruel system. She forwarded the first episodes to the editor of the Washington anti-slavery weekly, The National Era, where it was published it in 40 installments. Although many Northerners considered slavery a political institution for which they had no personal responsibility, Uncle Tom's Cabin was becoming a national sensation. The episodes attracted the attention of Boston publisher, J. P. Jewett, who published the work in March of 1852. Uncle Tom's Cabin immediately broke all sales records of the day: selling half-a-million copies by 1857. Stowe went on to many other literary projects, producing about a book a year from 1862 to 1884, but she is still most remembered as the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Newbery Medal-winning children's book author Christopher Paul Curtis was born in Flint, Michigan on May 10, 1953 and graduated from The University of Michigan. While there he won the Avery and Jules Hopwood Prizes for poetry and a draft of one of his early books. Curtis spent thirteen years on an assembly line hanging car doors. His story The Watsons Go to Birmingham-1963 received a Newbery Honor and a Coretta Scott King Honor, and Bud, Not Buddy became the first novel to win both of these awards. Elijah of Buxton received the 2008 Scott O'Dell Historical Fiction Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, and a Newbery Honor. Curtis also won the 2009 Anne V. Zarrow Award for Young Readers' Literature.
