Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott was born in 1832 in Germantown, Pennsylvania, the second of four daughters of the teacher and philosopher Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail May Alcott. She grew up mostly in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts, where family friends included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Her father's ideas about education and his failed experiments, such as the utopian community of Fruitlands, left the family poor, and Louisa worked from a young age as a seamstress, governess, teacher and servant, and began to write. During the Civil War she served as a nurse in a Union hospital in Washington, D.C., until she caught typhoid fever; her Hospital Sketches (1863) described the experience. She also wrote thrillers under a pen name. At her publisher's request she wrote a book for girls, Little Women (1868–1869), about the four March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, based on her own family. It was a great success, and she followed it with Little Men and Jo's Boys. She supported women's suffrage and abolition. She died in Boston in 1888, two days after her father.

Louisa May Alcott is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Daughter of the Transcendentalist Amos Bronson Alcott; her personal beliefs are not well documented. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911) (via Wikisource)