Alcott, << AWL kuht or AWL kot, >> Louisa May (1832-1888), was an American author. Her best-known book, Little Women (1868-1869), tells the story of four sisters growing up in a New England town during the mid-1800’s. Alcott also worked to gain voting rights for women and was active in the temperance (antidrinking) movement.
Alcott was born on Nov. 29, 1832, in Germantown, Pennsylvania, but she grew up in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts. Her father, Bronson Alcott, was a philosopher and educational reformer. The family’s friends and neighbors included the writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. William Ellery Channing, a prominent Unitarian minister, was also a friend. All these people influenced Alcott and helped form her ideas about politics and social reform.
Alcott spent most of her childhood in poverty because her father invested in many idealistic projects that failed. At an early age, she began to help support the family by working as a seamstress, a household servant, and a teacher. Her first book, Flower Fables (1855), consisted of fairy stories she made up to tell one of her students. Hospital Sketches (1863) contains letters she wrote home while nursing soldiers during the American Civil War (1861-1865).
Alcott’s first novel, Moods, was published in 1864. She became editor of Merry’s Museum, a magazine for girls, in 1867. That year, a publisher urged her to write a book for girls. She wrote Little Women, which became an immediate success. The income from sales of Little Women gave her financial security. In Little Women, Alcott gave American juvenile fiction an enduring family story, a new kind of girl character, and a narrative style less aimed at moral teaching. The March family in the book is largely the Alcott family. Jo March, the central character, is Louisa. The author continued the story of the March family in Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo’s Boys (1871) and Jo’s Boys, and How They Turned Out (1886).
Alcott’s other books for young readers include An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870) and Eight Cousins (1875). She also wrote novels for adults, including Work: A Story of Experience (1873) and A Modern Mephistopheles (1877), but these were less successful. She died on March 6, 1888.
