Award is for Excellence in Culture and Tourism
HARTFORD, CT — At a standing-room-only ceremony at the Legislative Office Building Wednesday evening, Joan Hedrick. the Charles A. Dana Professor of History at Trinity, was honored for exposing the public to the life and work of abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe and for her contributions to the arts and culture in Connecticut.
Hedrick, who joined Trinity’s faculty in 1980, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for her biography, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life, which Hedrick had spent 10 years researching and writing. The book also was chosen a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Biography. In his New York Times review, author E.L. Doctorow called the Stowe biography “a classic…engrossing, capacious, [and] definitive.”
Hedrick, who is a Middletown resident, also wrote Solitary Comrade: Jack London and His Work in 1982, and The Oxford Harriet Beecher Stowe Reader in 1999. Hedrick’s work has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation program and the Ford Foundation.
Stowe, who lived in the mid-1880s in an area of Hartford known as Nook Farm and whose house and library today are tourist destinations, wrote the abolitionist masterpiece, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. That book helped galvanize emotions in the North and South during the Civil War. But Stowe, whose work spanned 44 years, also worked to alleviate the harsh physical realities that governed many women’s lives during that time period. Hedrick’s book was the first major biography of Stowe to be written in a half-century.
For her masterpiece, Hedrick was one of four Connecticut residents to receive a 2008 Award for Excellence in Culture & Tourism. The event, which is held annually, was sponsored by the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism. The other honorees were Michael Wilson, artistic director of Hartford Stage; Gene Wilder, a comedic star of stage and screen from Stamford; and Vita West Muir, founder of the Litchfield Jazz Festival.
“Our honorees honor the rest of us by improving the quality of our lives and the economic vitality of out state,” said TV and radio personality Diane Smith, who served as the mistress of ceremonies for the event.
Presenting Hedrick’s award was Katherine Kane, executive director of the Stowe Center, who said the honor was in recognition of what a historian can do -- “ turn history into words that we can appreciate.” Kane described Stowe as the most famous American woman in the mid-1800s.
In receiving her award, Hedrick thanked Trinity College for its support of her teaching and scholarship, and said she felt fortunate “to live in a state with such a rich history and culture.” Of her biography of Stowe, Hedrick said she hoped it would “help restore her to her rightful place in American literature.”
Each of the honorees received a statuette, sculpted by Connecticut artist David Boyajian, which is a replica of Randolph Roger’s larger statue, “The Genius of Connecticut,” that was completed in 1878. The original bronze “Genius” stood atop the Capitol but was blown down during the Hurricane of 1938. It now stands in the north lobby of the Capitol.