Louisa May Alcott, American Author

Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 - March 6, 1888) was an American novelist and poet best known as the author of the novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886). Little Women is loosely based on Alcott's childhood experiences with her three sisters. The novel was very well received and is still a popular children's novel today, filmed several times. Raised in New England by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott, she grew up among many of the well-known intellectuals of the day, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Alcott's family suffered from financial difficulties, and while she worked to help support the family from an early age, she also sought an outlet in writing. She began to receive critical success for her writing in the 1860s. When the American Civil War broke out, she served as a nurse in the Union Hospital at Georgetown, DC, for six weeks in 1862-63. Early in her career, she sometimes used the pen name A. M. Barnard, under which she wrote novels for young adults that focused on spies, revenge, and crossdressers. Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist and remained unmarried throughout her life. She died from a stroke, in 1888, at the age of 55. Photographed by George Kendall Warren, 1870

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12697382

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47702721

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2950px x 4500px (2.3MB)

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LOC/Science Source/Mary Evans