best biography of louisa may alcott

Louisa May Alcott

Famed author Louisa May Alcott created colorful relatable characters in 19 th century novels. Her work introduced readers to educated strong female heroines. As a result, her writing style greatly impacted American literature.

Alcott was born on November 29, 1832 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Alcott’s parents were a part of the 19 th century transcendentalist movement, a popular religious movement. Their religious and political beliefs deeply inspired Alcott as child. Her father, Bronson Alcott, was a popular educator who believed that children should enjoy learning. Therefore, at an early age, Alcott took to reading and writing. While most of her schooling came from her parents she also studied under famed philosopher Henry David Thoreau and popular authors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathanial Hawthorne. Much like her novel Little Women , Alcott was one of four daughters and she remained close with her sisters throughout her life. Many times, Alcott’s family suffered from financial woes, forcing her to attend school irregularly. She took many jobs to help alleviate financial struggles, working as teacher and washing laundry. She turned to writing for both emotional and financial support.

Her first poem, “Sunlight,” was published in a magazine under a pseudonym. Her first book, a compilation of short stories, was published in 1854.  When the Civil War started in 1861, Alcott served as a nurse in a Union hospital. Unfortunately, in the middle of her assignment she contracted typhoid fever. Her experience in the hospital as a patient and a nurse, inspired the novel Hospital Sketches . After the war, Alcott published several other works and gained a following. Her audience included both adults and children. She also released many of her earlier works under the name, A.M. Barnard.

During this time, one of Alcott’s publishers asked her to write a novel for young women. To do so, she simply reflected back on to her childhood with her sisters. In 1868, Alcott published her most popular work , Little Women . The novel was published in a series of short stories, but was eventually compiled into one book. Little Women was an instant success and the book cemented Alcott as one of the foremost novelist of the 19 th and early 20 th century. In 1870, with one successful book, Alcott moved to Europe with her sister May. There she published, another classic Little Men . She also joined the women’s suffrage movement. Throughout her life, she would contribute to several publications which promoted women’s rights. She was also the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Connecticut.

Alcott never married nor had any children, however, when her sister died, she adopted her niece. Afterwards she moved to Boston, Massachusetts and continued publishing more works that followed the characters from Little Women . Alcott suffered from bouts of illness throughout her life. She attributed her poor health to mercury poisoning which she believed she contracted while she worked as a nurse during the Civil War. In 1888, she died at the age of 56 in Boston, Massachusetts. Today, readers continue to enjoy Alcott’s writings and her novels still appear on bestseller list throughout the world.

• Payne, Alma J. “Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888).” American Literary Realism , Vol 6, No. 1 (Winter, 1973) 26-43.
• Reisen, Harriet. Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women. New York: Picador, 2010.
• Stern, Madeline. Louisa May Alcott :A Biography . Boston: Northeastern University, 1999.
• IMAGE: Library of Congress

MLA – Norwood, Arlisha. "Louisa Alcott." National Women's History Museum. National Women's History Museum, 2017. Date accessed.

Chicago- Norwood, Arlisha. "Louisa Alcott." National Women's History Museum. 2017. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/lousia-alcott.

• LaPlante, Eve. Marmee & Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother . New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.
• Matteson, John. Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father. New York: W&W Norton & Company, 2008.
• Shealy,Daniel. Alcott in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollection, Interviews and Memoirs by Family, Friends and Associates. Boise: University of Iowa Press, 2005.
• “Little Women by Louisa May Alcott” Little Women by Louisa May Alcott: Primary Source Set. Accessed 30 March 2017, https://dp.la/primary-source-sets/sets/little-women-by-louisa-may-alcott/ .

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Louisa May Alcott

My book [ Flower Fables , December 1854] came out; and people began to think that topsy-turvy Louisa would amount to something after all, since she could do so well as housemaid, teacher, seamstress, and story-teller.  Perhaps she may.

~Louisa May Alcott, April 1855 Journal

Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania on November 29, 1832.  She and her three sisters -- Anna, Elizabeth, and [Abba] May -- were primarily educated by their father, teacher/philosopher A. Bronson Alcott, and raised on the practical Christianity of their mother, Abigail May.

Louisa spent her childhood in Boston and in Concord, Massachusetts, where her days were enlightened by visits to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s library, excursions into nature with Henry David Thoreau, and theatricals in the barn at "Hillside" (now "The Wayside").  Like the character of "Jo March" in Little Women, young Louisa was a tomboy.  "No boy could be my friend till I had beaten him in a race," she claimed, "and no girl if she refused to climb trees, leap fences . . ."

For Louisa, writing was an early passion.  She had a rich imagination and her stories often became the basis of melodramas she and her sisters would act out for friends.  Louisa preferred to play the "lurid" parts in these plays -- "the villains, ghosts, bandits, and disdainful queens," as she put it.

At age 15, troubled by the poverty plaguing her family, she vowed, "I will do something by and by.  Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t!"  Confronting a society that offered little opportunity to women seeking employment, Louisa nonetheless persisted:  ". . . I will make a battering-ram of my head and make my way through this rough and tumble world."  Whether as a teacher, seamstress, governess, or household servant, for many years Louisa did any work she could find.

Louisa’s career as an author began at the age of eight with poetry, and later short stories that appeared in popular magazines.  In 1854, when she was 22, her first book, Flower Fables , was published.  A major critical milestone along her literary path was Hospital Sketches (1863), a truthful and poignant account of her service as a Civil War nurse in Washington, DC inspired by the letters she wrote home to her family in Concord.

In 1868, when Louisa was 35 years old, her publisher, Thomas Niles, asked her to write "a girls' story."  The 492 pages of Little Women, Part I were dashed off within three months at the desk Louisa's father built for her in her Orchard House bedchamber.  The novel is largely based on the coming of age stories of Louisa and her sisters, with many of the domestic experiences inspired by events that actually took place at Orchard House.

Virtually overnight, Little Women was a phenomenal success, primarily due to its timeless storytelling about the first American juvenile heroine, "Jo March," who acted from her own individuality -- a free-thinking, flawed person, rather than the idealized stereotype of feminine perfection then prevalent in children’s fiction.

In all, Louisa published over 30 books and collections of short stories and poems.  She died on 6 March 1888, only two days after her father, and is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord.

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Louisa May Alcott

Despite being one of the most influential American authors of the 20th century, Louisa May Alcott’s resume goes well beyond her published works. 

Born on November 29, 1832, in Germantown, Pennsylvania, Louisa May Alcott was the daughter of Bronson Alcott and Abigail May. Louisa’s parents were her greatest influences, for both parents took active roles in the Transcendentalist Movement— a 19th-century movement emphasizing the perception of the individual through religious practices. Additionally, Bronson Alcott was a teacher with a firm belief that children ought to learn and enjoy reading and writing.  Consequently, Louisa developed a passion for writing at a young age. Despite her schooling coming primarily from her parents, Louisa had the opportunity to study under prominent individuals such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

Early in her writing career, Louisa May Alcott relied on writing as a means to cope with personal and environmental stressors. As a consequence, Louisa’s education was disrupted, for she had to prioritize her family needs over her passion for writing. Specifically, Louisa’s family was burdened with financial woes. In order to alleviate this burden, Louisa worked numerous jobs such as teaching, cleaning, and washing laundry. It was during this time that Louisa became a published author, her poem “Sunlight” was published in a magazine in 1851. Although very little money was made off of the publishing of her poem, it certified her love for writing at a professional level.    During the Civil War, Alcott shifted her talents from writing to nursing from the war’s onset in 1861.  Initially, Alcott completed simple tasks such as sewing Union uniforms and tending to minor soldier needs. The next year, Alcott officially enlisted as a nurse at a makeshift hospital in Washington, D.C, where she was tasked with comforting dying soldiers and assisting doctors performing in amputations. In the winter of 1863, Alcott began advocating for the abolition of slavery in addition to her efforts as a nurse, but these efforts were cut short by her contracting of typhoid fever. Despite being relieved of her nursing duties, Alcott made light of her brief nursing stint in her publishing of Hospital Sketches in 1863. This novel detailed a fictionalized twist on Alcott’s experiences as a wartime nurse, and its publishing jumpstarted the young Louisa May Alcott’s writing career.

Alcott returned to Boston after accepting an editorship of a children’s magazine known as Merry’s Museum. Thomas Niles, the magazine’s editor, tasked Alcott with writing a book catered towards young women. In order to complete this task, Alcott simply reflected on her childhood, specifically emphasizing her relationship with her three sisters. The novel’s initial form was a series of short stories, but the novel was later synthesized into one book known as Little Women. Alcott’s novel immediately became a bestseller. 

In addition to her efforts as a nurse and author, Louisa May Alcott devoted much of her time to reformation movements including, but not limited to, the women’s rights and temperance movements. In the 1870s, Alcott went door-to-door campaigning for women’s suffrage in Massachusetts. Additionally, Alcott attended the Women’s Congress of 1875 in Syracuse, New York. Louisa May Alcott devoted much of the 1870s towards writing for women’s rights periodicals such as Lucy Stone’s Woman’s Journal. By the decade’s end, Alcott became the first woman registered to vote in Concord. 

Unfortunately, Alcott’s bouts of illnesses caught up with her in 1888, for she died at the age of 56 in Boston, Massachusetts. It is speculated that the cause of her death was mercury poisoning which she contracted during her time as a Union nurse. Nonetheless, Alcott’s extraordinary efforts and writings live on to this day.   

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The Alcotts

Louisa May Alcott was the second of four daughters of Abigail May Alcott, the product of a distinguished Boston family, and philosopher Bronson Alcott, a self-educated farmer’s son. The Alcotts were the inner circle of the Transcendentalist movement; Bronson Alcotts closest friends were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The two great thinkers would be the objects of teenage Louisa’s intense romantic yearnings. Her childhood would be peopled with the most important activists of the abolition movement as well as the era’s leading intellectuals.

Bronson Alcott worked hard, but never with the mundane objective of earning a living, and brought his young family to the verge of homelessness and starvation. Alcott’s childhood poverty was tempered by family unity and intellectual riches. Under some 30 temporary Alcott roofs, she was taught to cultivate an open mind and a social conscience, and to revere nature as God’s best work. From the age of eight she would keep a journal, recording her passions, her moods, and her difficulty controlling her temper, and would continue to express her feelings throughout her lifetime in hundreds of works in a wide variety of literary forms.

When Louisa was 10, Bronson enlisted the family in an experiment in communal living on a tract he named Fruitlands in honor of its wizened orchard. Six months of Transcendental agriculture left the Alcotts destitute, Bronson suicidal, and the Alcott marriage on the verge of dissolution. A distressed Louisa reported it all in her childhood diary. The Fruitlands fiasco fueled Louisa’s fierce ambition to make the family rich. She wanted to be famous, too.

Her first and favorite plan was to attain wealth and renown by becoming a great actress. From her teenage years she wrote, costumed, produced, directed, and starred in plays. Off the stage, her life was not without drama. The Alcotts were staunch abolitionists, supporting complete racial equality, including intermarriage. As part of the Underground Railroad, they risked their own freedom hiding fugitive slaves. (Seven year-old Louisa once opened an unused oven to discover a frightened fugitive inside. She taught him to write letters.) As an adult she would know the orator Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Editor of The Liberator, the fiery antislavery newspaper; Mrs. John Brown, widow of the hanged leader of the raid on Harper’s Ferry; Julia Ward Howe, who wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, and Reverend Theodore Parker. In Boston and Concord, the Alcotts were intimates of the great transcendentalist thinkers and writers of the day. Emerson encouraged Louisa to spend hours in his library. On excursions at Walden Pond, she studied botany with Thoreau. The Hawthornes lived next door.

Young Louisa tried her hand at poetry as well as drama, and at the age of 17 wrote her first novel, The Inheritance, heavily influenced by Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. (The manuscript would languish for 130 years before it was discovered and published.)

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The Life and Writings of Louisa May Alcott

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Louisa May Alcott is known for writing  Little Women  and other children's stories as well as her connections to other Transcendentalist thinkers and writers . She was briefly a tutor of Ellen Emerson, daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson , and was a Civil War nurse. She lived from November 29, 1832 to March 6, 1888.

Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, but the family quickly moved to Massachusetts, a location with which Alcott and her father are usually associated.

As was common at the time, she had little formal education, taught mainly by her father using his unconventional ideas about education. She read from the library of neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson and learned botany from Henry David Thoreau . She associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne , Margaret Fuller , Elizabeth Peabody , Theodore Parker, Julia Ward Howe , and Lydia Maria Child .

The family's experience when her father founded a utopian community, Fruitlands, is satirized in Louisa May Alcott's later story, Transcendental Wild Oats. The descriptions of a flighty father and down-to-earth mother probably reflect well the family life of Louisa May Alcott's childhood.

She realized early that her father's flighty educational and philosophical ventures could not adequately support the family, and she sought ways to provide financial stability. She wrote short stories for magazines and published a collection of fables she'd originally written as tutor for Ellen Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson's daughter.

During the Civil War, Louisa May Alcott tried her hand at nursing, going to Washington, DC, to work with Dorothea Dix and the U.S. Sanitary Commission . She wrote in her journal, "I want new experiences, and am sure to get 'em if I go."

She became ill with typhoid fever and was affected for the rest of her life with mercury poisoning, the result of the treatment for that illness. When she returned to Massachusetts, she published a memoir of her time as a nurse, Hospital Sketches, which was a commercial success.

Becoming a Writer

She published her first novel, Moods , in 1864, traveled to Europe in 1865, and in 1867 began editing a children's magazine.

In 1868, Louisa May Alcott wrote a book about four sisters, published in September as Little Women, based on an idealized version of her own family. The book was successful quickly, and Louisa followed it a few months later with a sequel, Good Wives , published as Little Women or, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, Part Second . The naturalism of the characterizations and the non-traditional marriage of Jo were unusual and reflected the Alcott and May families' interest in Transcendentalism and social reform, including women's rights.

Louisa May Alcott's other books never matched the lasting popularity of Little Women . Her Little Men not only continues the story of Jo and her husband, but also reflects the educational ideas of her father, which he was never able to communicate effectively in writing.

Louisa May Alcott nursed her mother through her final illness, while continuing to write short stories and some books. Louisa's income financed the move from the Orchard House to the Thoreau house, more central in Concord. Her sister May died of complications of childbirth, and assigned guardianship of her child to Louisa. She also adopted her nephew John Sewell Pratt, who changed his name to Alcott.

Louisa May Alcott had been ill since her Civil War nursing work, but she became worse. She hired assistants to care for her niece, and moved to Boston to be near her doctors. She wrote Jo's Boys which neatly detailed the fates of her characters from her most popular fiction series. She also included the strongest feminist sentiments in this final book.

By this time, Louisa had retired to a rest home. Visiting her father's deathbed on March 4, she returned to die in her sleep on March 6. A joint funeral was held, and they were both buried in the family cemetery plot.

While she is best known for her writings, and is sometimes a source of quotations , Louisa May Alcott was also a supporter of reform movements including anti-enslavement , temperance , women's education , and women's suffrage .

Also known as:  L. M. Alcott, Louisa M. Alcott, A. M. Barnard, Flora Fairchild, Flora Fairfield

• Father: Amos Bronson Alcott, Transcendentalist, philosopher and educational experimenter, founder of Fruitlands, a utopian community which failed
• Mother: Abigail May, relative of abolitionist Samuel May
• Louisa was the second of four daughters
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Louisa May Alcott

Short stories.

On November 29, 1832, Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) was born the second daughter of Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail "Abba" May in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Her father, Bronson Alcott was a teacher that believed children should enjoy learning, a controversial notion for the time and he moved the family to Boston, Massachusetts in 1844 where he established the Temple School and joined the Transcendental Club with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau . Alcott's upbringing was greatly influenced by the Transcendentalist Movement , which strongly impacted her writing.

In 1862 Louisa headed to Washington, DC to serve as a Civil War nurse. During this time she contracted Typhoid fever and was treated with calomel, a mercury-laden drug used to treat the disease at the time. As a consequence, she suffered the effects of mercury poisoning for the remainder of her life. Her experiences as a nurse inspired her to write Hospital Sketches (1863). In 1864 she followed it with Moods. At this point in time, her publisher requested a "girl's story" and in two and a half months Alcott produced Little Women, a book that was largely based on her own experiences growing up with her tree sisters. Little Women, her most beloved work, was an instant success and the public demanded a second volume. The financial woes that had troubled the Alcott family were finally over as Little Women launched the author as a literary star.

Additional Biographical Sketch of Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott , author, b. in Germantown, Pa., 29 Nov., 1832; d. in Boston, Mass., 6 March, 1888. When she was about two years of age her parents removed to Boston, and in her eighth year to Concord, Mass. At the age of eleven she was brought under the influence of the community that endeavored to establish itself near Harvard, in Worcester co. Henry David Thoreau was for a time her teacher; but she was instructed mainly by her father. She began to write for publication at the age of sixteen, but with no marked success for fifteen years . During that time she devoted ten years to teaching. In 1862 she went to Washington as a volunteer nurse, and for many months labored in the military hospitals. At this time she wrote to her mother and sisters letters containing sketches of hospital life and experience, which on her return were revised and published in book form (Boston, 1863), and attracted much attention. In 1866 she went to Europe to recuperate her health, which had been seriously impaired by her hospital work, and on her return in 1867 she wrote “Little Women,” which was published the following year, and made her famous. The sales in less than three years amounted to 87,000 copies. Her characters were drawn from life, and are full of the buoyant, free, hopeful New England spirit which marked her own enthusiastic love for nature, freedom, and life. Her other stories were conceived in the same vein, and have been almost equally popular. They are: “Flower Fables or Fairy Tales” (Boston, 1855); “Hospital Sketches,” her first book, now out of print, reissued with other stories (1869); “An Old-Fashioned Girl” (1869); “Little Men” (1871); a series called “Aunt Jo's Scrap Bag” (1871-'82), containing “My Boys,” “Shawl Straps,” “Cupid and Chow-Chow” , “My Girls,” “Jimmy's Cruise in the Pinafore,” and “An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving” ; “Work, A Story of Experience” (1873); “Eight Cousins” (1874); “Rose in Bloom” (1876); “Silver Pitchers” (1876); “Under the Lilacs” (1878); “Jack and Jill” (1880); “Moods” (1864), reissued in a revised edition (1881); “Proverb Stories” (1882); “Spinning-Wheel Stories” (1884); “Lulu's Library,” the first of a new series (1885). Ednah D. Cheney wrote her life (Boston, 1889). — Another daughter, May, artist (Mrs. Ernest Nieriker ), b. in Concord, Mass., in 1840; d. in December, 1879. At the school of design in Boston, and in the studios of Krug, Rimmer, Hunt, Vautier, Johnston, and Müller she received the best attainable instruction, and subsequently divided her time between Boston, London, and Paris. After her marriage she lived mainly in Paris. Her strength was as a copyist and as a painter of still life, either in oils or water-colors. Her success as a copyist of Turner was such as to command the praise of Mr. Ruskin, and secure the adoption of some of her work for the pupils to copy at the South Kensington schools in London. In these branches of work she had few equals. She published “Concord Sketches,” with a preface by her sister (Boston, 1869).

-- Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography

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Many readers of “Little Women” have fantasized about being Jo; a few about being Meg, Beth or Amy. After reading Susan Cheever’s biography of Louisa May Alcott, even fewer would want to change places with the novel’s author. Like her heroine, Alcott was a bookish tomboy with three sisters, a writer who churned out pseudonymous melodramas before finding fame as a domestic novelist. Unlike Jo, Alcott never married, concluding that “liberty is a better husband than love.” Where Jo romps with her own children as well as a houseful of her husband’s students, Alcott declared that she “never liked girls” and stayed clear of children until adopting a niece at 48. A third difference is that “Little Women” portrays a matriarchal household made up of a mother, her daughters and their cook. Adding a servant spared her characters some of the domestic work that ate up Alcott’s own time. An even greater wish-fulfillment, however, lay in subtracting the man of the house. The March girls spend much of the novel waiting for their father to return from the Civil War, but in real life Alcott was the one who left Concord, Mass., in 1861 to nurse wounded soldiers.

Even after the surprise success of “Little Women,” Alcott remained ambivalent about what she subtitled “a girl’s book.” And scholars were slow to take “Little Women” seriously. Alcott’s male contemporaries (at least in America) set their novels on whaling ships and battlefields. The sickbed where Beth March spends much of the novel looked dull in comparison. Only in the 1970s did feminist critics begin to see the home itself as a battlefield: once the personal was political, the contrast between Meg’s hair-curling and Jo’s haircutting took on a new edge.

Read together, Cheever’s “Louisa May Alcott” and Richard Francis’ “Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia” help explain why Alcott dreamed of a fatherless family. Bronson Alcott’s biography would have made an absorbing story even if his famous daughter had never been born. This self-taught farm boy left school at 13, but became a celebrity lecturer and educational reformer and married into the New England elite. Despite (or because of) his eccentricities, he persuaded Boston’s finest families to send their children to his experimental school.

Like many educational theorists, Bronson Alcott found his own children hard to manage. And, again like many visionaries, he also found it hard to hold down a job. As a result, the family moved 29 times in as many years. In 1843 Bronson helped found Fruitlands, a utopian community 15 miles west of Boston. Members of the commune, which numbered 13 people at its height, advocated abolitionism, environmentalism, feminism and anarchism, forswearing meat, alcohol, neckcloths, haircuts, cotton (because it was grown by slaves) and leather (because it was harvested from animals). Their rejection of one more animal product, manure, helps explain why Fruitlands failed after only eight months: this new Eden remained barren in the absence of fertilizer.

In “Transcendental Wild Oats,” a satiric memoir Louisa based on the diary she kept at Fruitlands, one character asks “Are there any beasts of burden on the place?” and is answered, “Only one woman!” In real life, the expulsion of the lone female convert, probably for helping herself to some fish on the sly, left Louisa’s mother, Abigail, to do all the women’s work and much of the men’s — especially since Bronson and his sidekick, Charles Lane, made a habit of disappearing on recruiting trips at the very moment farm labor was required. Abigail’s more serious complaint was that Lane threatened to break up her marriage. Some historians think Lane was in love with Abigail, others with Bronson. Whatever the case, Abigail forced her family to move before the first winter was out.

Was Bronson a genius misunderstood by a mercenary world or a narcissist whose financial fecklessness drove his daughter into domestic labor and literary hack work? Reasonably enough, Cheever accepts both hypotheses. Yet in describing Louisa May Alcott as “an impoverished and abused child,” she plays down the advantages derived from the family’s connections. “Little Women” might never have been written if not for Louisa’s father: the publisher Thomas Niles offered to take Bronson’s “Tablets,” a collection of excerpts from his diary arranged by zodiac signs, on condition that Louisa throw in a “girl’s book” to sweeten the deal.

In a post-Freudian age, when memoirs habitually chronicle unhappy childhoods, an oppressed Louisa tugs at the reader’s heart. And Cheever isn’t the only biographer to celebrate a heroine ahead of her time, depicting a genius we have the good taste to appreciate more fully than did her contemporaries. Yet the historical record suggests that “Little Women” exists because of 19th-century American culture, not in spite of it. Alcott was able to assert the importance of girls’ private lives because Boston was in a ferment over women’s rights; she was able to publish that assertion because she was born into the local literary elite. Cheever’s representation of Alcott typifies the logic in which biographers credit accomplishments to the individual while blaming setbacks on the society: heads, I win; tails, you lose.

Richard Francis, whose previous books have dealt with the New England Transcendentalists and Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers, more fully embeds Alcott in a time and place. And his group biography reconstructs an intellectual history whose actors tended to be more prolific than articulate. (“I am what I am, and it is out of my Iamity that I am phenomenized,” declared one of Bronson Alcott’s admirers.) In contrast, Cheever confines history to breathless lists: “In Paris, Degas was beginning to draw ballerinas, Monet was painting landscapes and Courbet was painting a woman with a parrot. Baudelaire was writing poetry, and Émile Zola essays and novels. At home Reconstruction was proceeding full-tilt.” Where Francis excavates abstract ideas, Cheever’s interest lies in private relationships — specifically, in father-daughter struggles.

“Home Before Dark,” Cheever’s biography of her own father, John Cheever, haunts her account of Alcott’s life. Both books describe an upper-class mother and an intellectual father moving from house to house without ever fitting in. Both blame a father for caring more about his writing than his children. Cheever even frames her choice of subject as a rebellion against her father. Remembering a family visit to the Alcotts’ house, she writes: “While the tour guide was distracted by a literary question of my father’s about Ralph Waldo Emerson, I secretly stroked the little desk where ‘Little Women’ had been born.” Later, we learn that “my father wrote a plane hijacking in a story of his” and that “my father had tuberculosis as a child.” The Fruitlands commune set out to replace biological kinship with alliances among like-minded idealists. That we now think of Bronson Alcott as a father first and a writer second suggests how stubbornly the family persists.

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT

By Susan Cheever

Illustrated. 298 pp. Simon & Schuster. $26.

The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia

By Richard Francis

Illustrated. 321 pp. Yale University Press. $30.

Leah Price is a professor of English at Harvard. Her “Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books,” will be published next year.

How Louisa May Alcott's Real-Life Family Inspired 'Little Women'

The writer didn't have to look far to pen the now-classic American novel.

Her latest book, Little Women , was a runaway bestseller — and the constant barrage of fan mail, the visits and the demands on her time had wrecked her already delicate health. “Don’t send me any more letters from so cracked girls,” she begged her mother in a letter from Switzerland in 1870. “The rampant infants must wait.”

The “infants” were Louisa’s fans, and ever since the publication of Little Women , they had bombarded her with letters asking for a sequel and demanding to know how much of the book was autobiographical — a question readers still pose today. Louisa had captured the world’s imagination with her tale of the brave, beloved March family, and Little Women — a book about the Civil War –era lives of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March, four sisters who struggle with life, love and friendship — has never been out of print. But Louisa’s real-life family, upon whom the book was partly based, was infinitely more complicated — and even more interesting.

Louisa's father was a transcendentalist

Born in Pennsylvania in 1832, Louisa was one of four sisters, the daughters of Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail “Abba” Alcott. Bronson, a self-educated Romantic, left his Connecticut home as a teenager to become a Yankee peddler , a type of traveling salesman. Life on the road suited the idealistic, optimistic Bronson, but he was a bad salesman and soon found himself in debt. This began a pattern of financial mismanagement and poverty that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Even though Bronson couldn’t handle money, he was passionate and idealistic — high-minded ideals attracted the young Abba. Born into relative wealth and social prestige as the daughter of a prominent New England family, Abba was drawn to Bronson’s love of education and social justice. The couple married in 1830.

Where Bronson was absent-minded, Abba was practical. When her husband’s schools failed because of his controversial, student-focused teaching methods, she lent him moral support. When he infuriated parents by admitting an African American student to his Boston school, she stood by him. And when he immersed himself in Transcendentalism — a new progressive philosophical movement that emphasized self-reliance, imagination and creativity — she went right along with him.

He began a utopian commune which served as inspiration one of Louisa's satires

Bronson was always in search of ways to put his ideals into action, and in 1843 he picked up his family and began a utopian commune called Fruitlands in Harvard, Massachusetts. It was an unmitigated disaster. Though it was supposed to be a communal farm, Bronson knew nothing about farming and refused to use animals to work the land. The family kept to a vegetarian diet and eschewed all products derived from enslaved people labor. The land was hard to farm and the family nearly starved. Eventually, the experiment strained Abba and Bronson’s marriage nearly to a breaking point. Fruitlands failed in 1844 after just eight months.

Louisa would later write a satirical account of her family’s time at Fruitlands, called Transcendental Wild Oats . In it, she represents her father as a doomed dreamer whose philosophies are unsuited to the harsh world. “The world was not ready for Utopia yet,” she wrote, “and those who attempted to found it only got laughed at for her pains.” Privately, though, Louisa was much more negative about Bronson’s inability to support his family.

Louisa had three sisters who mirrored the March sisters

Even after moving back to Concord, Massachusetts, the family struggled with money. Bronson, consumed with causes linked to Transcendentalism and abolitionism, rarely worked, so Abba had to pick up the slack. She became one of America’s first professional social workers, and her daughters, Anna, Louisa, Elizabeth and Abigail May, worked as governesses, domestic servants and teachers to help support the family.

Oldest sister Anna, on whom domestic, marriage-minded Meg March of Little Women was based, was a talented actor, but felt her only option was to marry to escape her family’s poverty. “I have a foolish wish to be something great and I shall probably spend my life in a kitchen and die in the poor-house,” she wrote in her diaries.

Little is known about the inner life of Elizabeth, the third Alcott daughter, who was called “Lizzie” by her family. Her death at age 22 of scarlet fever devastated the Alcotts, and the angelic character of Beth March in Little Women , who, like Lizzie, contracts a fatal illness after helping a poor family, is Louisa’s tribute to her sister.

Abigail, better known as May, was the youngest Alcott sister, and she had big ambitions. With the financial assistance of Louisa, who had found success as a writer of short stories, poems and essays, May trained as an artist in Boston and Europe, gaining recognition as a painter and rubbing shoulders with figures like the Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt. In 1877, one of her paintings was displayed in the Paris Salon, and, as one of the few professional women artists of her age, she fought discrimination in her profession and struggled to help other poor women pursue art. Amy March, a self-centered artist who finds love with the family’s next-door neighbor in the novel, is based on May.

Though Louisa was just as independent and talented as Jo March, her literary counterpart, her life was marked by struggle and sorrow. During her bout as a Civil War nurse, she was treated with mercury for typhoid. Modern doctors believe she likely suffered from an autoimmune disorder such as lupus , based on photographs that show a rash on her face. Regardless of any health issues, Louisa worked herself to exhaustion trying to provide for her family.

Louisa was skeptical about 'Little Women'

In 1868, Louisa’s publisher asked her to write a book for girls. At first, she protested, but her need for money drove her to comply. In a matter of weeks, she dashed off the first volume of Little Women . “I plod away although I don’t enjoy this sort of thing,” she wrote in her journal at the time. “Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters, but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it.”

Louisa’s skepticism was unfounded: Little Women was a smash hit. Soon, readers demanded a sequel. Louisa continued the story of Jo and her sisters with a second volume of Little Women that followed the girls into adulthood and marriage. She went on to publish multiple novels for girls, but felt hemmed in by her public image as the beloved author of children’s stories. Her adult fiction, which explored quandaries of love, feminism and philosophy, failed to gain a footing, while her health was irrevocably damaged by poverty and the grind of her work life. “Anyone who dreams of wealth and fame might be warned by this story of a woman who struggled so hard to make money that by the time she reached her goal she could not longer appreciate its benefits,” writes Louisa’s biographer, Susan Cheever writes.

Louisa never regained her health after the success of Little Women , but her later years weren’t as dismal as it may seem. When her sister May died in Europe in 1879, Louisa helped raise her daughter, Louisa May Nieriker. Louisa’s hard work and passion lived on in her niece — and in the books that survived her. Without her unusual family, there would have been no Louisa May Alcott — an author whose work sprang from an extraordinary life.

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Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography Paperback – November 8, 2011

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• Print length 298 pages
• Language English
• Publication date November 8, 2011
• Dimensions 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.44 inches
• ISBN-10 1416569928
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition (November 8, 2011)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 298 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1416569928
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1416569923
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.8 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.44 inches
• #3,982 in Author Biographies
• #8,904 in Women's Biographies
• #11,791 in Historical Biographies (Books)

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It's Louisa May Alcott as you've never seen her before!

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Susan cheever.

I was born in New York City and have lived here on and off my entire life--in fact I went to nursery school a few blocks from where I write this. It took me a long time to admit I was a writer--I had a career as a teacher and I loved it. When I was married I couldn't get a teaching job so by an amazing stroke of luck I went to work for my local small town newspaper. After a long time as a newspaper and magazine journalist, I took off to write a novel when I was 35 and I haven't looked back.

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Boston Women’s Heritage Trail

Boston Women Making History

Louisa May Alcott

Louisa may alcott (1832-88).

Although author Louisa May Alcott (1832-88) is best known for her book, Little Women, describing her family life in Concord, Massachusetts, she had several homes in Boston where she was better able to earn money to support her family. On the other hand, for those who are still trying to find somewhere to earn cash, they can now quickly do so thanks to games like 카지노사이트 . When her writing began to sell, living in Boston kept her close to her publisher, Roberts Brothers, and to other reformers and literary figures.

Louisa was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1832 to Bronson Alcott and Abigail May. Louisa’s mother was a member of the prominent May family of Boston where they attended King’s Chapel. Louisa’s father, Bronson Alcott, was a teacher who would become one of America’s most influential reformers of education. He was also part of the Transcendentalist movement, which encouraged the perfection of the individual. As an educator, Bronson Alcott stressed the intellectual, physical, and emotional development of each child on his or her own terms, through dialogue between teacher and child. Louisa’s older sister, Anna, had already been born. Two more sisters, Elizabeth and Abby May would succeed.

In 1834, Bronson Alcott moved his family to Boston where he opened his progressive and controversial Temple School in the Tremont Temple on Tremont Street. To assist him with teaching, he relied on two of the brightest women in Boston—Elizabeth Peabody and Margaret Fuller, who were also Transcendentalists. Their work produced Alcott’s book Conversations with Children (1836), which shocked Bostonians when they learned he was teaching children a more “personalized” view of Jesus. When Bronson Alcott enrolled a young African American girl in his school, insisting on a school policy of color blindness, parents withdrew their children and the school closed by 1840. Alcott nearly went bankrupt.

Meanwhile, his family was living in Concord in one of several houses they would occupy and Louisa was being educated at home. Louisa once wrote, “I never went to school except to my father or such governesses as from time to time came into the family … so we had lessons each morning in the study. And very happy hours they were to us, for my father taught in the wise way which unfolds what lies in the child’s nature as a flower blooms, rather than crammed in, like a Strasburg goose, with more than it could digest.” However, the Alcott family struggled financially and always would. Bronson Alcott was a brilliant philosopher and educator, but a dismal provider.

The Alcotts lived near fellow Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau whose counsel Bronson Alcott sought for new projects and guidance. In 1834, he moved his family to Harvard, Massachusetts, where he hoped to establish a model community called Fruitlands. As the historian Joan Goodwin described the project, “Fruitland [made] use of no animal products or labor, except, as Abigail Alcott observed, for that of women. She and her small daughters struggled to keep household and farm going while the men went about the countryside philosophizing.”

The harsh reality of winter brought an end to Fruitlands, and the Alcotts returned to Concord where they took another house near Emerson called Hillside. Louisa was allowed to use the great man’s impressive library, and she began to read works of great literature and history that sparked her imagination. In her teenaged years she began to write thrillers, which she hoped to sell and provide income for, as she put it, her “pathetic family.” She wrote her first such story in 1848, although it was not published until four years later in the Olive Branch. Meanwhile, Louisa and her older sister took teaching positions to earn money. A brief stint as a governess in Dedham led to her essay “How I Went Out to Service.” Publisher James T. Fields rejected her work and advised her, “Stick to your teaching, Miss Alcott. You can’t write.”

Louisa was now living in Boston, taking in sewing, serving as a governess, reading, and working to improve her writing. What money she made, she sent home to Concord. In Boston, Louisa also encountered some of the greatest reformers of the nineteenth century, including Theodore Parker, Wendell Phillips, John Turner Sargent, and William Lloyd Garrison. She enjoyed the Boston theater and had one of her plays accepted but not performed. Between 1855 and 1857, while summering in Walpole, New Hampshire, she organized the Walpole Amateur Dramatic Company. In 1857, back in Concord, she formed the Concord Dramatic Union.

Still writing, tutoring, and supporting her family from Boston, Louisa’s stories were finally beginning to sell. In 1863, “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,” written under the pen name A. M. Barnard, appeared in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newsletter. For her effort, she won $100. Louisa was also writing two serious novels that would be published a number of years later: Moods and Work.

During the winter of 1862-3, Louisa worked as a nurse at the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown, Virginia, wanting to contribute what she could to the end of slavery which she, her father, and so many of their friends had been advocating for years. Unfortunately, she contracted typhoid pneumonia and had to return home. (It is likely that the mercurous chloride with which she was treated contributed to her early death.)

Louisa May Alcott’s brief service as a Civil War nurse inspired her to write “Hospital Sketches” which appeared in the Boston Commonwealth as a series and as a book in 1863. Hospital Sketches was enormously popular, and her work was now in demand. After the war, Louisa traveled to Europe as the companion of Anna Weld for a short visit to see the sites she had read about as a girl. When she returned to Boston, she accepted the editorship of Merry’s Museum, a children’s magazine. She also became its major contributor. In 1867, the magazine’s editor, Thomas Niles, asked her to write a book especially for girls. The result was part one of Little Women. The book was a best seller, and readers clamored for more. Part two appeared the following spring.

As Joan Goodwin explains, “from this point on Louisa May Alcott was a victim of her own success. Though she yearned to do more serious fiction, children’s books flowed from her pen for the rest of her life because their sales supported her family. Louisa herself wrote, “Twenty years ago, I resolved to make the family independent if I could. At forty that is done. Debts all paid, even the outlawed ones, and we have enough to be comfortable. It has cost me my health, perhaps; but as I still live, there is more for me to do, I suppose.”

Goodwin goes on to write that now “Alcott gave her energy to practical reforms, women’s rights and temperance. She attended the Women’s Congress of 1875 in Syracuse, New York, where she was introduced by Mary Livermore. She contributed to Lucy Stone’s Woman’s Journal while organizing Concord women to vote in the school election. ‘Was the first woman to register my name as a voter,’ she wrote. ‘Drove about and drummed up women to my suffrage meeting. So hard to move people out of the old ruts.’ And again, ‘Helped start a temperance society much needed in C[oncord]. I was secretary, and wrote records, letters, and sent pledges, etc.’”

Louisa continued to publish children’s books, and in 1880, after the death of her sister, May, shortly after childbirth, she welcomed May’s infant daughter who was named for Louisa but called “Lulu.” She published the stories she told the little girl as Lulu’s Library. In 1882, after her father suffered a stroke, Louisa settled the remaining members of her family at 10 Louisburg Square. Her own health was failing, and she moved “from place to place in search of health and peace to write, settling at last in a Roxbury nursing home,” according to Joan Goodwin.

Bronson Alcott died on March 4, 1888; Louisa died two days later at the age of fifty-six. By then, knowing her death was not far off despite her young age, she had legally adopted her widowed sister Anna’s son John Pratt to whom she willed her copyrights. Any income would be shared by Anna, Lulu, John, and Anna’s other son Fred.

Louisa May Alcott was buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord on “Author’s Ridge” near Thoreau and Emerson. A Civil War veteran’s marker graces her gravestone. During her lifetime, she produced almost three hundred literary works.

– Bonnie Hurd Smith

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A scholar discovers stories and poems possibly written by Louisa May Alcott under a pseudonym

The author of “Little Women” may have been even more productive and sensational than previously thought.

Max Chapnick, a postdoctoral teaching associate at Northeastern University, believes he found about 20 stories and poems written by Louisa May Alcott under her own name as well as pseudonyms for local newspapers in Massachusetts in the late 1850s and early 1860s.

One of the pseudonyms is believed to be E. H. Gould, including a story about her house in Concord, Massachusetts, and a ghost story along the lines of the Charles Dickens classic “A Christmas Carol." He also found four poems written by Flora Fairfield, a known pseudonym of Alcott's. One of the stories written under her own name was about a young painter.

“It's saying she’s really like ... she’s hustling, right? She’s publishing a lot,” Chapnick said on a visit to the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester , a national research library of pre-20th century American history and culture that has some of the stories Chapnick discovered in its collection as well as a first edition of “Little Women.”

Alcott remains best known for “Little Women,” published in two installments in 1868-69. Her classic coming-of-age novel about the four March sisters — Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy — has been adapted several times into feature films, most recently by Greta Gerwig in 2019.

Chapnick discovered Alcott's other stories as part of his research into spiritualism and mesmerism. As he scrolled through digitized newspapers from the American Antiquarian Society, he found a story titled “The Phantom." After seeing the name Gould at the end of the story, he initially dismissed it as Alcott’s story.

But then he read the story again.

Chapnick found the name Alcott in the story — a possible clue — and saw that it was written about the time she would have been publishing similar stories. The story was also in the Olive Branch, a newspaper that had previously published her work.

As Chapnick searched through newspapers at the society and the Boston Public Library, he found more written by Gould — though he admits definitive proof they were written by Alcott's has proven elusive.

“There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence to indicate that this is probably her,” said Chapnick, who last year published a paper on his discoveries in J19, the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. “I don’t think that there’s definitive evidence either way yet. I’m interested in gathering more of it.”

When first contacted by Chapnick about the writings, Gregory Eiselein, president of the Louisa May Alcott Society, said he was curious but skeptical.

“Over my more than thirty-year career as a literary scholar, I’ve received a variety of inquiries, emails, and manuscripts that propose the discovery of a new story by Louisa Alcott,” Eiselein, also a professor at Kansas State University, said in an email interview. “Typically, they turn out to be a known, though not famous, text, or a story re-printed under a new title for a different newspaper or magazine.”

But he has come to believe that Chapnick has found new stories, many of which shed light on Alcott's early career.

“What stands out to me is the impressive range and variety of styles in Alcott’s early published works,” he said. “She writes sentimental poetry, thrilling supernatural stories, reform-minded non-fiction, work for children, work for adults, and more. It’s also fascinating to see how Alcott uses, experiments with, and transforms the literary formulas popular in the 1850s.”

Another Alcott scholar at Kansas State, Anne Phillips, said she was “excited” by Chapnick's scholarship and said his paper makes a “compelling case” that these were her writings.

“Alcott scholars have had decades to compare her work in different genres, and that background is going to help us evaluate these new findings," she said in an email interview.

“She reworked and reused names and situations and details and expressions, and we have a good, broad base from which to begin considering these new discoveries,” she said. ”There’s also something distinctive about her writing voice, across genres."

This isn't the first time that scholars have found stories written by Alcott under a pseudonym.

In the 1940s, Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern found thrillers written under the name A. M. Barnard was an Alcott pseudonym. She also wrote nonfiction stories, including about the Civil War where she served as a nurse, under the pseudonym Tribulation Periwinkle.

It wasn't unusual for female writers, especially during this period, to use a pseudonym. In the case of Alcott, she may have wanted to protect her family's reputation, since her family who though poor had wealthy connections that dated back to the American Revolutionary War.

“She might not have wanted them to know she was writing trashy stories about sex and ghosts and whatever,” Chapnick said.

“I think she was canny,” he continued. “She had an inkling that she would be a famous writer and she was trying to experiment and she didn’t want her experimentation to get in the way of her future career. So she was writing under a pseudonym to sort of like protect her future reputation.”

At the American Antiquarian Society, a researcher eagerly awaited the arrival of Chapnick earlier this month. For them, this find is validation that their collection of nearly 4 million books, newspapers, periodicals, manuscripts and pamphlets is a boon to researchers studying early American history. Many of their holdings are salvaged from attics, antique shops, book fairs, garage sales.

“We’re keeping these things for a reason. We’re not just keeping them to hoard them and pile them up,” Elizabeth Pope, the curator of books and digitized collections at the society. “We’re thrilled when people can find stories in them.”

For Chapnick, the collections offer the possibility of finding additional Alcott stories — including those written under other pseudonyms.

“The detective work is fun. The not knowing is kind of fun. I both wish and don’t wish that there would be a smoking gun, if that makes sense," he said. “It would be great to find out one way or the other, but not knowing is also very interesting.”

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