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...