Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, wrote this 1869 novel with the intent of describing a New England village's life and character in the years after the Revolutionary War, before the advent of industrialization. Said Stowe, in the voice of the novel's narrator Horace Holyoke, "I would endeavor to show you New England in its seed-bed, before the hot suns of modern progress had developed its sprouting germs into the great trees of today." She based some of the book on the childhood memories of her husband, Calvin Ellis Stowe, and the residents of his birthplace, Natick, Massachusetts.