Louisa May Alcott

Alcott, Louisa May

(1832–88) writer; born in Germantown, Pa. She was tutored by her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, until 1848, and studied informally with family friends such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Theodore Parker. Residing in Boston and Concord, Mass., she worked as a domestic servant, a teacher, and at other jobs to help support her family (1850–62); during the Civil War she went to Washington, D.C., to serve as a nurse. Unbeknown to most people, she had been publishing poems, short stories, thrillers, and juvenile tales since 1851, under the pen name of "Flora Fairfield"; in 1862 she also adopted the pen name "A. M. Barnard"; some of her melodramas were actually produced in Boston stages. But it was her account of her Civil War experiences, Hospital Sketches (1863), that confirmed her desire to be a serious writer. She began to publish stories under her real name in Atlantic Monthly and Lady's Companion and took a brief trip to Europe in 1865 before becoming editor of a girls' magazine, Merry's Museum, in 1868. The great success of Little Women (1869–70) gave her financial independence and also created a demand for more writings. For the rest of her life she turned out a steady stream of novels and short stories, most for young people, and, like Little Women, drawing fairly directly on her family life: Little Men (1871), Eight Cousins (1875), Jo's Boys (1886). She also tried her hand at adult novels—Work (1873), A Modern Mephistopheles (1877)—but did not have the literary talent to attract serious readers. Like so many women of her day and class, she supported women's suffrage and temperance; but she never found much happiness in her personal life. She grew impatient with the demands made on her as a successful writer, she became the caretaker of her always impractical father, and she became increasingly beset by physical ailments that led to a succession of remedies and healers. Sickly and lonely, she died at age 55 on the day of her father's funeral.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.