Louisa May Alcott Biography

Louisa May Alcott (29 November 1832-6 March 1888) still retains her reputation as one of America's best-loved writers of juveniles. That reputation was established with the publication of Little Women (1868-1869), a domestic novel for girls primarily autobiographical in origin. Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, the daughter of the Transcendental philosopher and educator Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail May, and, with her three sisters, grew up in Concord, Massachusetts. Her family background of high-minded idealism coupled with often acute poverty reappears in Little Women as the background of the Marches. Often Louisa was the only mainstay of her family and she refused no work that would add to the family income, from sewing to domestic service, from teaching to serving as companion to an invalid on a European tour. The work she preferred, however, was writing, and she tried her ink-stained hand at a wide variety of genres for the periodical press: poetry, fairy tales, short stories of sweetness and light, realistic episodes of the Civil War based upon her brief experience as a nurse at the Union Hotel Hospital, Georgetown, D.C., and blood-and-thunder thrillers of passion and revenge published under the pseudonym of "A. M. Barnard." Her first published book, Flower Fables (1855), "legends of faery land," was dedicated to Emerson's daughter Ellen and netted the author thirty-two dollars. Her first novel, Moods (1865), a narrative of stormy violence, death, and intellectual love, was an attempt to apply Emerson's remark: "Life is a train of moods like a string of beads." Off and on, she worked at an autobiographical, feminist novel, Success , subsequently renamed Work: A Story of Experience. In 1868 she undertook editorship of a juvenile monthly, Merry's Museum, and that same year Thomas Niles of Roberts Brothers, the Boston publishers, asked her to write a girls' story. By that time she had served a long literary apprenticeship and was already a professional writer. The result of Niles' request was Little Women.

Its characters were drawn from those of Alcott's sisters, its scenes from the New England where she had grown up, and many of its episodes from those she and her family had experienced. In the creation of Little Women, Alcott was something of a pioneer, adapting her autobiography to the production of a juvenile novel, and achieving a realistic but wholesome picture of family life with which young readers could readily identify. The Alcott poverty was sentimentalized, the eccentric Alcott father was an adumbrated shadow; yet, for all the glossing over, the core of the domestic drama was apparent. Reported simply and directly in a style that applied her injunction "Never use a long word, when a short one will do as well," the narrative embodied the simple facts and persons of a family and so filled a gap in the literature of adolescence. With the publication of Part II of Little Women in 1869, its success became apparent. The book was received with critical acclaim and popular enthusiasm. Thousands of copies were sold; a perennial bestseller had been born. Alcott's masterpiece was followed, between 1869 and her death in Roxbury in 1888, by a succession of wholesome domestic narratives, the so-called Little Women series. More or less autobiographical in origin, perceptive in the characterization of adolescents, all are in a sense sequels of Little Women, though none of them quite rises to its level. Louisa Alcott , who never married, wryly considered that she had taken her pen as a bridegroom. Her bibliography encompasses nearly 300 books, articles, novels, short stories, and poems. Despite her experimentation with a diversity of literary techniques, despite the fact that she was a complex writer drawn to a variety of themes, Louisa Alcott has inevitably achieved fame as the "Children's Friend" and the author of a single masterpiece. Thanks to its psychological perceptions, its realistic characterizations, and its honest domesticity, Little Women has become an embodiment of the American home at its best. As the Boston Herald commented after her death: "When the family history, out of which this remarkable authorship grew, shall be told to the public, it will be apparent that few New England homes have ever had closer converse with the great things of human destiny than that of the Alcotts."