Louisa May Alcott 1832 – 1888

Biography

Louisa May Alcott was an American novelist best known for Little Women, one of the most beloved children’s books ever written. Born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1832, she was raised in Massachusetts by her father, the transcendentalist educator Bronson Alcott, and grew up among Emerson and Thoreau. The family’s poverty forced her to work as a teacher, seamstress, and Civil War nurse, experiences that fed her writing. Little Women, published in 1868 and based on her own family, made her famous and wealthy, and she followed it with Little Men and Jo’s Boys. She was also a committed abolitionist and suffragist, and secretly wrote lurid sensation stories under a pseudonym. She died in Boston in 1888, two days after her father’s death. Her home in Concord, Orchard House, is now a museum, and Little Women has never been out of print since its first publication.