Louisa May Alcott biography

Louisa May Alcott, author of the classic novel, "Little Women", was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania on November 29, 1832 to Amos Bronson and Abigail May Alcott. She had three sisters, Anna, Elizabeth and May, and a brother who died in infancy.

Alcott was strongly influenced by her upbringing. Bronson Alcott Bronson was an avid Transcendentalist. He was self-taught, but became a noted, but controversial, education reformer. The family moved to Massachusetts where he started The Temple School in 1834. There he encouraged open discussion of all subjects, including skeptical inquiry into the meanings of the Bible. When he admitted a mulatto girl, the school was run out of business by shocked citizens.

Alcott's parents were never comfortable financially, in spite of their social status, intellectual activities and reform work. Although Bronson Alcott worked as an author, school administrator and teacher, he was often unemployed. He once started a Transcendentalist commune called Fruitlands in 1843, but it failed within six months. Abigail Alcott was active as a reformer in the Suffrage and Abolitionist causes of the mid to late 1800s and worked as a social worker. She was the primary money earner in the family until the daughters were old enough to help. It was the daughters, primarily Louisa May, who would ultimately be financial responsible for the family. Louisa May Alcott said that her career was formulated from a desire to alleviate the poverty her family had endured early in life. The girls worked as teachers, seamstresses and maids.

The attitude encouraging an intellectual life was unusual for girls in the nineteenth century. Louisa and her sisters were taught to speak their thoughts and to work for money. They were taught that they could make a difference through activism in causes about which they cared.

Alcott's first published writing was a poem titled "Sunshine". It was published under the pseudonym Flora Fairfield when she was nineteen. Her first short story, "The Rival Painters: A Tale of Rome" was published a year later. She wrote her first novel, "The Inheritance", at the age of seventeen, but it was unpublished until 1997 when the longhand manuscript was discovered at the Houghton Library at Harvard University.

Alcott served for a time as a Civil War nurse at the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown where she was part of the experiment of bringing Florence Nightingale's style of nursing to the United States. Clara Barton was instrumental in instituting female medical attendants- nurses- in war time recovery units. Alcott's nursing duty ended when she contracted typhoid fever and nearly died. The treatment included the use of mercury from which she was poisoned, and never fully recovered. She wrote a book in three parts called "Hospital Sketches" about the life of a Civil War nurse.

She wrote another book called "Transcendental Wild Oats" about her time spent living in her family's commune. These works were lauded by such people as Emerson, a leader in the Transcendentalist movement. She also wrote darker stories for periodicals, both anonymously and under the pseudonym "A. M. Barnard". These were comparable to those of Edgar Allen Poe. Her first novel was called "Moods" and was considered immoral. But it sold well and encouraged her to continue writing. In the following year she traveled as an assistant to a wealthy invalid and during that time was offered a job as editor of a children's magazine called "Merry's Museum" which she gladly accepted. She edited and wrote for the magazine.

The best loved book by Alcott was "Little Women", published in 1868. In the book, a character dies of scarlet fever, just as Alcott's sister Lizzie did at the age of 22. This book was unusual for its time, in that it depicted girls with well spoken opinions, and it reflected the life of the author. "Little Women" was part of a series of three books which included "Little Men" (written after her sister Anna was widowed) and "Jo's Boys".

Like her parents, Louisa May Alcott was active in social reform causes, including abolition, women's suffrage, temperance and education reforms, but she was most active in women's rights issues. She was the first woman to register to vote in Concord. She never married.

Alcott died on March 6, 1888, two days after the death of her father. She was fifty-six. She was buried on "Author's Ridge" near her family, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. By the time of her death, her book sales had exceeded one million copies, a remarkable tally in that time. She had earned $200,000 for her work. One hundred years after her death she still had books on the best seller lists. There is a crater on the moon named after her.