Louisa May Alcott

• Born: 29 November 1832
• Birthplace: Germantown, Pennsylvania
• Died: 6 March 1888
• Best Known As: The author of Little Women

Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women, a novel for young readers that's been popular since its appearance in 1868. Born in Pennsylvania, she's most closely associated with Boston and Concord, Massachusetts, where she grew up with the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, associates of her father, Transcendentalist philosopher (Amos) Bronson Alcott. A childhood of financial insecurity apparently made Louisa determined to be a success. She had a literary reputation after the 1863 publication of her experiences as a Civil War nurse (Hospital Sketches), but she made money in the 1860s writing potboilers and publishing them anonymously or pseudonymously. Her market-savvy Little Women was based on her own experiences growing up (she's associated with the character Jo) and cemented her fame and fortune. Her other works include Good Wives (1869), Little Men (1871), Rose in Bloom (1876) and Jo's Boys (1886).

(click to enlarge)
Louisa May Alcott, portrait by George Healy; in the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association … (credit: Courtesy of Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

(born Nov. 29, 1832, Germantown, Pa., U.S. — died March 6, 1888, Boston, Mass.) U.S. author. Daughter of the reformer Bronson Alcott, she grew up in Transcendentalist circles in Boston and Concord, Mass. She began writing to help support her mother and sisters. An ardent abolitionist, she volunteered as a nurse during the American Civil War, where she contracted the typhoid that damaged her health the rest of her life; her letters, published as Hospital Sketches (1863), first brought her fame. With the huge success of the autobiographical Little Women (1868 – 69), she finally escaped debt. An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Little Men (1871), and Jo's Boys (1886) also drew on her experiences as an educator.

For more information on Louisa May Alcott, visit Britannica.com.

Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) is one of America's best-known writers of juvenile fiction. She was also a reformer, working in the causes of temperance and woman's suffrage.

Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pa., in 1832. She was the daughter of Bronson Alcott, the Concord transcendentalist philosopher and educator. She and her three sisters spent their childhood in poverty. However, they had as friends, and even as tutors, some of the most brilliant and famous men and women of the day, such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Theodore Parker. This combination of intellectual plenty and physical want endowed Alcott with an ironical sense of humor. She soon realized that, if she or her sisters did not find ways to bring money into the home, the family would be doomed to permanent poverty.

In her early years Alcott worked at a variety of menial tasks to help financially. At 16 she wrote a book, Flower Fables (not published for 6 years), and she wrote a number of plays that were never produced. By 1860 she was publishing stories and poems in the Atlantic Monthly. During the Civil War she served as a nurse until her health failed, and her Hospital Sketches (1863) brought the first taste of widespread public attention.

The attention seemed to die out, however, when she published her first novel, Moods, in 1865, and she was glad to accept in 1867 the editorship of the juvenile magazine Merry's Museum. The next year she produced the first volume of Little Women, a cheerful and attractive account of her childhood, portraying herself as Jo and her sisters as Amy, Beth, and Meg. The book was an instant success, so in 1869 she produced the second volume. The resulting sales accomplished the goal she had worked toward for 25 years: the Alcott family was financially secure.

Little Women had set the direction, and Alcott continued a heavy literary production in the same vein. She wrote An Old-fashioned Girl (1870), Little Men (1871), and Work (1873), an account of her early efforts to help support the family. During this time she was active in the causes of temperance and woman's suffrage, and she also toured Europe. In 1876 she produced Silver Pitchers, a collection containing "Transcendental Wild Oats," an account of her father's disastrous attempts to found a communal group at Fruitlands, Mass. In later life she produced a book almost every year and never wanted for an audience.

Alcott died on March 6, 1888, in Boston. She seems never to have become bitter about her early years or her dreamy, improvident father, but she did go so far as to say that a philosopher was like a man up in a balloon: he was safe as long as three women held the ropes on the ground.

Further Reading

Ednah Cheney, ed., Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals (1889), is an early biography. Also of interest are Katharine S. Anthony, Louisa May Alcott (1938), and Marjorie M. Worthington, Miss Alcott of Concord (1958). A documented, full-length study of Miss Alcott's works is Madeleine B. Stern, Louisa May Alcott (1950).

Alcott, Louisa May (1832–88), American writer of fantasy tales, best known for her classic novel Little Women (1868). Alcott, whose father was friends with Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, was strongly influenced by transcendentalism, particularly the idea, which permeates all her tales, that in order to change society as a whole one must begin by reforming the individual. In her Flower Fables (1854), initially written for Emerson's daughter Ellen, Alcott's fairy‐flower protagonists learn that love can transform a cold heart (‘The Frost‐King; or, the Power of Love’) and that selfishness leads to unhappiness (‘Lily Bell and Thistledown’). In her second collection, The Rose Family (1864), three fairy sisters go to the good fairy Star to overcome their idleness, wilfulness, and vanity. Among other stories with fairy‐tale motifs, Alcott wrote ‘Fairy Pinafores’, in which Cinderella's fairy godmother, looking for ‘some other clever bit of work to do’, gathers 100 homeless children to make magic pinafores (published in Aunt Jo's Scrap‐Bag: Cupid and Chow‐Chow, 1873); and ‘The Skipping Shoes’, in which Alcott rewrites ‘The Red Shoes’ and has Kitty, who refuses to do what people ask, wear shoes she does not like, the magical powers of which force her to do as she is told (published in Lulu's Library: A Christmas Dream, 1886). Other collections of Alcott's fairy and fantasy stories include Morning Glories, and Other Stories (1867), and Lulu's Library: The Frost King (1887).

— Anne Duggan

(1832-1888), author. Alcott spent her early years in and around Boston, where her transcendentalist father, Bronson, wrote, lectured, and established short-lived experimental primary schools. Her mother, Abigail May, was an early and ardent abolitionist and involved in many contemporary issues including feminism, dietary reforms, and the causes of poverty. Alcott grew up surrounded by the writers and activist friends of her parents such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, the Peabody sisters, William Lloyd Garrison, Orestes Brownson, and Margaret Fuller. Although Alcott associated transcendentalism with impracticality and fuzzy thinking, she was deeply affected by the abolitionist cause. Her active role in her mother's struggles with the family's poverty caused by Bronson's economic vagaries led Alcott to feminism. For reasons of health and temperament, she manifested her allegiance with the suffrage movement more in her writings than in public.

Alcott began writing as an adolescent, publishing her first story, "The Rival Prima Donnas," in a theatrical paper. She called the story, which featured two actresses pitted against one another professionally and personally, "rubbish" and followed it quickly with Flower Fables, fairy stories she had written for Emerson's daughter, Ellen. These tales illustrated the theme that hard work, self-denial, and patience can win love from even the chilliest heart.

These beginnings indicate the two directions Alcott's work would take. On the one hand, she wrote, enthusiastically and often pseudonymously, colorful and improbable stories for grown-ups about unrequited or tragically misdirected love, jealousy, vengeance, and retribution. On the other hand, she wrote, more slowly and with less gusto, moral stories for children, which illustrated the principles of Flower Fables. As she matured, these works also contained lessons for women about transcending their roles as mothers and housekeepers by becoming doctors, writers, or charity workers.

In the winter of 1862-1863 Alcott went to Washington, D.C., as a nurse in Dorothea Dix's newly established service. She washed, fed, and tended wounded soldiers until, after only a few weeks, she fell ill. In accordance with army medical practice she was given large doses of calomel, an emetic containing mercury, which rendered her a semi-invalid for the last two decades of her life. She returned home to convalesce. In the following years she wrote her most exciting pseudonymous thrillers as well as Hospital Sketches, a humorous account of her nursing experiences.

In 1868, following an often repeated suggestion of her father, who had an exceptionally strong influence on her life, she wrote Little Women. It was a heartwarming and rigidly moral account of her difficult childhood and her strenuous efforts to cope with her rebellious thoughts and feelings while growing up in a large, poor family, guided unsteadily by an improvident idealist. The success of Little Women was immediate and lasting. Alcott dismissed it and its many sequels (Good Wives, Little Men, Jo's Boys, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, and Under the Lilacs) as "pap" for the young, but she enjoyed some aspects of her success including the comforts and the trips to New York and Europe it provided her and her family. Her health deteriorated, and she died at the age of fifty-five, four days after the death of her eighty-eight-year-old father.

Bibliography:

Louisa May Alcott, Plots and Counterplots, ed. Madeleine Stern (1977).

Author:

Martha Saxton

See also Feminist Movement; Literature; Transcendentalism.

Quotes:

"Life is my college. May I graduate well, and earn some honors."

"Stay is a charming word in a friend's vocabulary."

"It takes people a long time to learn the difference between talent and genius, especially ambitious young men and women."

"Girls are so queer you never know what they mean. They say No when they mean Yes, and drive a man out of his wits for the fun of it."

"Happy is the son whose faith in his mother remains unchallenged."

"Housekeeping ain't no joke."

See more famous quotes by Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott at about age 20
Born	November 29, 1832(1832-11-29) Germantown, Philadelphia, PA
Died	March 6, 1888 (aged 55) Boston, Massachusetts
Pen name	A. M. Barnard
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	United States
Writing period	Civil war
Subjects	Young Adult stories
Notable work(s)	Little Women
Influences Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Charles Dickens
Signature
Official website

Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist. She is best known for the novel Little Women, set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts and published in 1868. This novel is loosely based on her childhood experiences with her three sisters.

Contents 1 Childhood and early work 2 Literary success and later life 3 Selected works 4 Published as 5 See also 6 Footnotes 7 References 8 Further reading 9 External links

Childhood and early work

Alcott was the daughter of noted transcendentalist and educator Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail May Alcott. She shared a birthday with her father on November 29. In a letter to his brother-in-law, Samuel Joseph May, a noted abolitionist, her father wrote: "It is with great pleasure that I announce to you the birth of my second daughter...born about half-past 12 this morning, on my [33rd] birthday." Though of New England heritage, she was born in Germantown, which is currently part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was the second of four daughters; Anna Bronson Alcott was the eldest, Elizabeth Sewall Alcott and Abigail May Alcott were the two youngest. The family moved to Boston in 1834,^[1] After the family moved to Massachusetts, her father established an experimental school and joined the Transcendental Club with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

In 1840, after several setbacks with the school, the Alcott family moved to a cottage on 2 acres (8,100 m²) of land, situated along the Sudbury River in Concord, Massachusetts. The Alcott family moved to the Utopian Fruitlands community for a brief interval in 1843-1844 and then, after its collapse, to rented rooms and finally to a house in Concord purchased with her mother's inheritance and financial help from Emerson. They moved into the home they named "Hillside" on April 1, 1845.^[2]

Alcott's early education included lessons from the naturalist Henry David Thoreau. She received the majority of her schooling from her father. She also received some instruction from writers and educators such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller, who were all family friends. She later described these early years in a newspaper sketch entitled "Transcendental Wild Oats." The sketch was reprinted in the volume Silver Pitchers (1876), which relates the family's experiment in "plain living and high thinking" at Fruitlands.

As an adult, Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist. In 1847, the family housed a fugitive slave for one week. In 1848 Alcott read and admired the "Declaration of Sentiments" published by the Seneca Falls Convention on women's rights.

Poverty made it necessary for Alcott to go to work at an early age as an occasional teacher, seamstress, governess, domestic helper, and writer. Her first book was Flower Fables (1855), a selection of tales originally written for Ellen Emerson, daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1860, Alcott began writing for the Atlantic Monthly. When the American Civil War broke out, she served as a nurse in the Union Hospital at Georgetown, D.C. for six weeks in 1862-1863. Her letters home, revised and published in the Commonwealth and collected as Hospital Sketches (1863, republished with additions in 1869), garnered her first critical recognition for her observations and humor. Her novel Moods (1864), based on her own experience, was also promising.

She also wrote passionate, fiery novels and sensation stories under the nom de plume A. M. Barnard. Among these are A Long Fatal Love Chase and Pauline's Passion and Punishment. Her protagonists for these tales are willful and relentless in their pursuit of their own aims, which often include revenge on those who have humiliated or thwarted them. These works followed a style which was wildly popular at the time and achieved immediate commercial success.

Alcott also produced wholesome stories for children, and, with the exceptions of the semi-autobiographical tale Work (1873), and the anonymous novelette A Modern Mephistopheles (1875), which attracted suspicion that it was written by Julian Hawthorne, she did not return to creating works for adults.

Literary success and later life

Louisa May Alcott

Alcott's literary success arrived with the publication of the first part of Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, (1868) a semi-autobiographical account of her childhood with her sisters in Concord, Massachusetts. Part two, or Part Second, also known as Good Wives, (1869) followed the March sisters into adulthood and their respective marriages. Little Men (1871) detailed Jo's life at the Plumfield School that she founded with her husband Professor Bhaer at the conclusion of Part Two of Little Women. Jo's Boys (1886) completed the "March Family Saga."

Most of her later volumes, An Old Fashioned Girl (1870), Aunt Jo's Scrap Bag (6 vols., 1871–1879), Eight Cousins and its sequel Rose in Bloom (1876), and others, followed in the line of Little Women.

Alcott based her heroine "Jo" on herself in "Little Women." But whereas Jo marries at the end of the story, Alcott remained single throughout her life. She explained her "spinsterhood" in an interview with Louise Chandler Moulton, "... because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man."^[3]'

In 1879 her younger sister, May, died. Alcott took in May's daughter, Louisa May Nieriker ("Lulu"), who was two years old. The baby had been named after her aunt, and was given the same nickname.

In her later life, Alcott became an advocate of women's suffrage and was the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Massachusetts in a school board election.

Louisa May Alcott's grave in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts

Alcott, along with Elizabeth Stoddard, Rebecca Harding Davis, Anne Moncure Crane, and others, were part of a group of female authors during the Gilded Age to address women’s issues in a modern and candid manner. Their works were, as one newspaper columnist of the period commented, "among the decided 'signs of the times'" (“Review 2 – No Title” from The Radical, May 1868, see References below).

Alcott continued to write until her death. Alcott suffered chronic health problems in her later years. Alcott and her earlier biographers attributed her illness and death to mercury poisoning: During her American Civil War service, Alcott contracted typhoid fever and was treated with calomel, a compound containing mercury. Recent analysis of Alcott's illness suggests that mercury poisoning was not the culprit. Alcott's chronic health problems are associated with autoimmune disease, not acute mercury exposure. Moreover, a late portrait of Alcott shows rashes on her cheeks characteristic of lupus.^[4][5] Alcott died in Boston on March 6, 1888 at age 55, two days after visiting her father on his deathbed. Her last words were "Is it not meningitis?"^[6]

The story of her life and career was initially told in Ednah D. Cheney's Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters and Journals (Boston, 1889) and then in Madeleine B. Stern's seminal biography Louisa May Alcott (University of Oklahoma Press, 1950).

Selected works

• The Inheritance (1849, unpublished until 1997)
• Flower Fables (1854)
• Hospital Sketches (1863)
• The Rose Family: A Fairy Tale (1864)
• Moods (1865, revised 1882)
• Morning-Glories and Other Stories (1867)
• The Mysterious Key and What It Opened (1867)
• Little Women or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (1868)
• Three Proverb Stories (includes "Kitty's Class Day", "Aunt Kipp" and "Psyche's Art") (1868)
• Part Second of Little Women, also known as "Good Wives" (1869)
• An Old Fashioned Girl (1870)
• Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag (1872-1882)
• Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo's Boys (1871)
• "Transcendental Wild Oats" (1873)
• Work: A Story of Experience (1873)
• Eight Cousins or The Aunt-Hill (1875)
• Beginning Again, Being a Continuation of Work (1875)
• Silver Pitchers, and Independence: A Centennial Love Story," (1876)
• Rose in Bloom: A Sequel to Eight Cousins (1876)
• Under the Lilacs (1878)
• Jack and Jill: A Village Story (1880)
• Jo's Boys and How They Turned Out: A Sequel to "Little Men" (1886)
• Lulu's Library (1886-1889)
• A Garland for Girls (1888)
• Comic Tragedies (1893)

As A. M. Barnard

• Behind a Mask, or a Woman's Power (1866)
• The Abbot's Ghost, or Maurice Treherne's Temptation (1867)
• A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866 - first published 1995)

First published anonymously

• A Modern Mephistopheles (1877)

Published as

• Little Women, Little Men, Jo's Boys (Elaine Showalter, ed.) (Library of America, 2005) ISBN 978-1-93108273-0

See also

• Orchard House, where Alcott lived when writing Little Women
• Walpole, New Hampshire, where the abundant lilacs in the town inspired Alcott to write the book Under the Lilacs
• Greenwich Village, New York City, where Alcott lived for a time while she was writing "Little Women"

Footnotes

1. ^ Obituary: Louisa May Alcott, New York Times, March 7, 1888. The obituary indicates that the family moved to Boston when Alcott was 2 years old, therefore in 1834-5. This is supported by the United States Census, 1850 which records that her younger sister, Elizabeth, was born in Massachusetts and was aged 15 (therefore born around 1835) at the time of the census.
2. ^ Matteson, John. Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007: 174. ISBN 978-0-393-33359-6
3. ^ Little Women Introduction, Penguin Classics, 1989. ISBN 0-14-039069-3
4. ^ Lerner, Maura. "A diagnosis, 119 years after death." Star Tribune. 12 August 2007. http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/health/11345301.html
5. ^ Hirschhorn, Norbert and Greaves, Ian. "Louisa May Alcott: Her Mysterious Illness." Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. Volume 50, Number 2, Spring 2007, pp. 243-259.
6. ^ vu.union.edu - Famous Last Words

References

• Shealy, Daniel, Editor. "Alcott in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends and Associates." University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, Iowa, 2005. ISBN 0-87745-938-X.
• “Review 2 – No Title” from The Radical (1865 - 1872). May 1868. American Periodical Series 1740 - 1900.[1] (link is password only) (29 January 2007).

Further reading

• Saxton, Martha (1977). Louisa May: A Modern Biography of Louisa May Alcott. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-25720-4. 
• MacDonald, Ruth K. (1983). Louisa May Alcott. Twayne. ISBN 0-8057-7397-5. 
• Myerson, Joel; Daniel Shealy, Madeleine B. Stern (1987). The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott. Little, Brown. ISBN 0-316-59361-3. 
• Myerson, Joel; Daniel Shealy, Madeleine B. Stern (1989). The Journals of Louisa May Alcott. Little, Brown. ISBN 0-316-59362-1. 

External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Louisa May Alcott

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Louisa May Alcott

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Louisa May Alcott

• Full text of "Transcendental Wild Oats"
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, Louisa May Alcott
• Annotation of Hospital Sketches at NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database, with link to the e-text.
• Works by Louisa May Alcott at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Louisa May Alcott at Internet Archive
• Works by Louisa May Alcott at Online Books Page
• Works by Louisa May Alcott at Project Gutenberg Australia
• Index entry for Louisa May Alcott at Poets' Corner

Sources

• Bibliography (including primary works and information on secondary literature - critical essays, theses and dissertations)

Other

• The Louisa May Alcott Society A scholarly organization devoted to her life and works.
• Louisa May Alcott, the real woman who wrote Little Women. A web site about Louisa May Alcott which will be the foundation for a documentary film, published media and educational programs.
• Obituary, NY Times, March 7, 1888, Louisa M. Alcott Dead
• Minneapolis Tribune, March 7, 1888, OBITUARY: Miss Louisa M. Alcott
• Biographical information

Persondata
NAME	Alcott, Louisa May
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Barnard, A. M. (literary pseudonym)
SHORT DESCRIPTION	writer
DATE OF BIRTH	November 29, 1832(1832-11-29)
PLACE OF BIRTH	Germantown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH	March 6, 1888
PLACE OF DEATH	Boston, Massachusetts

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