Louisa May Alcott Author 1832-1888

Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania on November 29, 1832. As a child she was very adventurous, hated to be bored, and always wanted to play with the boys (which was not acceptable at the time). She was taught mostly at home by her father. Her writing talent was noticeable at an early age and her parents encouraged her to write, especially in her diary. As a teenager she wrote several plays, poems, and short stories. In 1834 the Alcott family moved to Massachusetts finally settling in the Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts. There they became neighbors with the families of other writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. To help support her family, Alcott worked as a teacher, seamstress, and servant. Her varied work experiences provided her with material for her novels. Hospital Sketches, published in 1863, was a fictional account of Alcott's six months as a volunteer nurse in a military hospital during the Civil War. The book was such a success that Alcott believed she should write novels depicting real life. Little Women (1868), her most popular novel, was about the life of the March family and she used members of her own family as characters. Little Men (1871) continues the story of the March family and Jo's Boys (1886) depicts the careers and marriages of the March sisters' children and friends. In addition to novels, Alcott wrote poems and essays that were about her own life. "Thoreau's Flute" told of the time she spent at Walden Pond and "Transcendental Wild Oats" was a humorous account of her father's attempt to establish a perfect community at Fruitlands. Alcott also wrote many thriller stories for magazines, but she did not use her real name for those. Alcott, who never married, supported women's rights and the women in her stories have careers other than that of mother and homemaker. Louisa May Alcott died on March 6, 1888.   http://www.louisamayalcott.org/ Back to Massachusetts Webquest