Louisa May
Alcott was born in Germantown, now part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on November 29,
1832. She was an American novelist best known as the author
of the novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels Little
Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886). Raised in New
England by her transcendentalist parents, she grew up among many
of the well-known intellectuals of the day, such as Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow.
Her family suffered from financial difficulties, and
while she worked to help support the family from an early age, she also sought
an outlet in writing. She began to receive critical success for her writing in
the 1860s. Early in her career, she sometimes used the pen name A. M.
Barnard, under which she wrote novels for young adults that focused on spies,
revenge, and cross dressers.
Published in 1868, Little Women is
set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts,
and is loosely based on Louisa May Alcott's childhood experiences
with her three sisters. The novel was very well received and is still a
popular children's novel today, filmed several times.
She was
an abolitionist and a feminist and remained unmarried
throughout her life. She died from a stroke in Boston on March 6, 1888.
