Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet born on November 29, 1832, in Germantown, now part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She grew up in New England as the second of four daughters of Abigail May, a social worker, and Amos Bronson Alcott, a transcendentalist and educator. Her childhood brought her into contact with some of the best-known intellectuals of her time, including Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. From early on, her family encouraged her writing, and she kept a journal as a child.

Alcott is best known for Little Women, published in 1868, and for its sequels: Good Wives in 1869, Little Men in 1871, and Jo’s Boys in 1886. Little Women was loosely based on her childhood with her sisters Anna, Elizabeth, and May, and it became one of her first successful novels. It has since been adapted for film and television. Before that wider success, she gained critical attention in the 1860s with Hospital Sketches, a book drawn from her service as a nurse in the American Civil War.

Her path as a writer was shaped by both ideas and need. The Alcott family often faced financial hardship, and Louisa took on different jobs from an early age to help support them while also trying to earn money through writing. Early in her career she sometimes used pen names, including A. M. Barnard, under which she wrote lurid short stories and sensation novels for adults. Writing was not only a calling for her; it was also work, a means of helping her family, and a way to manage emotion in a household full of experiment, argument, and reform.

Alcott’s education was unusual. Her father taught morals, improvement, and “the sweetness of self-denial,” while her mother encouraged imagination and supported her writing at home. Thoreau instructed her in biology and Native American history, and Emerson mentored her in literature. As a girl she wrote her first poem, “To the First Robin,” at eight years old. The family’s time at places such as Hosmer Cottage, Fruitlands, and Hillside gave her firsthand experience of idealistic living, strict routines, hard work, playacting, reading, and the pressures of uncertain income.

Alcott was also an abolitionist and a feminist. She remained unmarried, and throughout her life she was active in reform movements including temperance and women’s suffrage. During the last eight years of her life, she raised the daughter of her deceased sister. She died of a stroke in Boston on March 6, 1888, two days after her father’s death, and was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Her books continue to speak because they draw from real family feeling, moral struggle, humor, ambition, and the effort to live with courage under ordinary pressures.