1. Read Little Women. Compare the main characters in that novel with the main characters in Meigs's biography of Louisa May Alcott.

2. Draw parallels between Pilgrim's Progress and Louisa's way of life. How is Louisa influenced by this work which so greatly influenced her father?

3. Meigs mentions that Louisa admires the German author Goethe. Read some of his work and determine why Louisa may have liked it.

4. Bronson Alcott's farm, Fruitlands, is an experiment in communal living similar to Nathaniel Hawthorne's communal venture at Brook Farm. Compare the two undertakings. Why do you think they failed?

5. Bronson Alcott was a transcendentalist. Define this term. How did the movement begin? What effects, if any, has it had on life in the twentieth century?

6. The conditions in the military hospital where Louisa nurses are atrocious.

The wards are unsanitary, the food is inadequate...