Louisa May Alcott
1 book analyzed
Biography
Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, in a household of distinguished poverty. Her father, Bronson Alcott, was a transcendentalist philosopher and notoriously impractical; her mother, Abigail 'Abba' May Alcott, held the family together with relentless practical effort — she is the model for Marmee. Louisa nursed soldiers during the Civil War (an experience she fictionalized in Hospital Sketches), wrote sensational fiction under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard to pay her family's bills, and was finally asked by her publisher Thomas Niles to write 'a book for girls.' She resisted — she found girls' books boring. She wrote Little Women anyway, in ten weeks, and it made her famous and financially secure for the first time in her life. She never married. She explicitly identified with Jo March and explicitly said she wished Jo had not married either.