Caroline Lee Hentz

Born Caroline Lee Whiting in Lancaster, Massachusetts, in 1800, she became a teacher while still young and built an early reputation for writing poetry, stories, and plays. After marrying Nicolas Marcellus Hentz in 1824, she lived in several Southern states, experiences that strongly shaped her fiction and public outlook.

She went on to become one of the best-known American women writers of her day, publishing novels, short fiction, and other work for a large readership. Her best-known novel, The Planter's Northern Bride (1854), was written as a pro-slavery answer to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and that position remains a central part of how her legacy is understood.

She died in Marianna, Florida, in 1856. Today, she is remembered both for her success as a widely read author and for the way her writing reflects — and defended — the values of the slaveholding South.