Seth Curtis Beach (Essay Date 1905)

SOURCE: Beach, Seth Curtis. "Louisa May Alcott." In Daughters of the Puritans: A Group of Biographies, pp. 251-86. Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1905.

In the following essay, Beach emphasizes Alcott's life as the source of her work and her father as a dominant influence in her development and identity.

Miss Alcott has been called, perhaps truly, the most popular story-teller for children, in her generation. Like those elect souls whom the apostle saw arrayed in white robes, she came up through great tribulation, paying dearly in labor and privation for her successes, but one must pronounce her life happy and fortunate, since she lived to enjoy her fame and fortune twenty years, to witness the sale of a million volumes of her writings, to receive more than two hundred thousand dollars from her publishers, and thereby to accomplish the great purpose upon...