She died on March 6, 1888, only two days after her father, and is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord.Though Louisa May Alcott is often associated with the sweetness of her characters in Little Women, she was a tough woman, shaped largely by her experience growing up in poverty. In all, Louisa published over 30 books and collections of stories. Jo March was the first American juvenile heroine to act from her own individuality a living, breathing person rather than the idealized stereotype then prevalent in children’s fiction.

The novel is based on Louisa and her sisters’ coming of age and is set in Civil War New England. When Louisa was 35 years old, her publisher Thomas Niles in Boston asked her to write 'a book for girls.' Little Women was written at Orchard House from May to July 1868. A milestone along her literary path was Hospital Sketches (1863) based on the letters she had written home from her post as a nurse in Washington, DC as a nurse during the Civil War. In 1854, when she was 22, her first book Flower Fables was published. Louisa’s career as an author began with poetry and short stories that appeared in popular magazines. Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t!'Ĭonfronting a society that offered little opportunity to women seeking employment, Louisa determined '.I will make a battering-ram of my head and make my way through this rough and tumble world.' Whether as a teacher, seamstress, governess, or household servant, for many years Louisa did any work she could find. Louisa preferred to play the 'lurid' parts in these plays, 'the villains, ghosts, bandits, and disdainful queens.'Īt age 15, troubled by the poverty that plagued her family, she vowed: 'I will do something by and by. She had a rich imagination and often her stories became melodramas that she and her sisters would act out for friends. Like her character, Jo March in Little Women, young Louisa was a tomboy: 'No boy could be my friend till I had beaten him in a race,' she claimed, ' and no girl if she refused to climb trees, leap fences.'įor Louisa, writing was an early passion.

Louisa spent her childhood in Boston and in Concord, Massachusetts, where her days were enlightened by visits to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s library, excursions into nature with Henry David Thoreau and theatricals in the barn at Hillside (now Hawthorne’s 'Wayside'). She and her three sisters, Anna, Elizabeth and May were educated by their father, philosopher/ teacher, Bronson Alcott and raised on the practical Christianity of their mother, Abigail May. Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania on November 29, 1832. The Abbot's Ghost, or Maurice Treherne's Temptation (1867)Ī Long Fatal Love Chase (1866 – first published 1995)

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