Caroline Lee Hentz

Born in Lancaster, Massachusetts, on June 1, 1800, Caroline Lee Hentz was an American writer who published novels, short fiction, children’s work, and plays. She married Nicholas Marcellus Hentz, and the couple lived in several Southern states, including North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida.

Hentz became a successful and widely read author in the 1840s and 1850s. She is especially remembered for domestic novels such as Linda; or, The Young Pilot of the Belle Creole and for The Planter’s Northern Bride, a forceful pro-slavery response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. That political stance is now central to how her work is understood.

She died in Marianna, Florida, on February 11, 1856. Today, she is studied both as a significant figure in popular nineteenth-century American literature and as a writer whose fiction defended slavery and reflected the sharp sectional conflicts of her time.