Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist. She is best known for the novel Little Women, written and 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.
Easton Press Louisa May Alcott books
Little Women - 100 Greatest Books Ever Written - 1976
Little Men - 1988
Franklin Library Louisa May Alcott books
Little Women - World's Best Loved Books - 1980
Little Women - 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature - 1980
(This page contains affiliate links for which we may be compensated.)
Who was Louisa May Alcott?
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, 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. 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 moralistic and 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
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."
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.
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).
How did Louisa May Alcott die?
Alcott
continued to write until her death, which can be attributed to mercury
poisoning. During her American Civil War service, she contracted typhoid
fever which was commonly treated with calomel, a compound containing
mercury. This treatment hampered her health for much of her later life.
She 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?"
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).
Louisa May Alcott books in order
The Inheritance (1849, unpublished until 1997)
Flower Fables (1854)
Hospital Sketches (1863)
A Pair of Eyes, or Modern Magic (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)
A Modern Mephistopheles (1877, first published anonymously)
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)
The Fate of the Forrests
A Double Tragedy: An Actor's Story
Ariel, A Legend of the Lighthouse
A Nurse's Story
May Flowers
Pen name A. M. Barnard
A Marble Woman; or, The Mysterious Model (1865)
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)
Short stories
The Rival Painters: A Tale of Rome (1852)
Love and Self-Love (1860)
Enigmas (1864)
The Skeleton in the Closet (1867)
Doctor Dorn's Revenge (1868)
Fatal Follies (1868)
My Mysterious Mademoiselle (1869)
Lost in a Pyramid; or, The Mummy's Curse (1869)
Perilous Play (1876)
The Candy Country (1885)
Which Wins?
Honor's Fortune
Mrs. Vane's Charade
Taming a Tartar
Fate in a Fan
Short story collections
Flower Fables (1854)
On Picket Duty, and other tales (1864)
Morning-Glories and Other Stories (1867)
Kitty's Class Day and Other Stories (Three Proverb Stories) (1868)
Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag (1872–1882). (66 short stories in six volumes)
1. Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag
2. Shawl-Straps
3. Cupid and Chow-Chow
4. My Girls, Etc.
5. Jimmy's Cruise in the Pinafore, Etc.
6. An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc.
Proverb Stories (1882)
Spinning-Wheel Stories (1884)
Lulu's Library (1886–1889)
A Garland for Girls (1887)
Poems
Sunlight (1851)
My Kingdom (written 1845, published 1875)
The Children's Song (written 1860, published 1889)
Young America (1861)
With A Rose That Bloomed on the Day of John Brown's Martyrdom (1862)
Thoreau's Flute (1863)
In the Garret (1865)
The Sanitary Fair (1865)
Come, Butter, Come (1867)
What Shall the Little Children Bring (1884)
Oh, the Beautiful Old Story (1886)
The Fairy Spring (1887)
Louisa May Alcott quotes
"I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship."
"Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead."
"Love is the only thing that we can carry with us when we go, and it makes the end so easy."
"I like good strong words that mean something."
"I'd rather take coffee than compliments just now."
"Housekeeping ain't no joke."
Source and additional information: Louisa May Alcott