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Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888)
 The daughter of
Transcendentalist Amos Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, among
such influential thinkers and writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and
Henry David Thoreau. Her early education included lessons from Thoreau's naturalist writings.
Alcott's early working life included a variety of occupations. She spent time as a teacher, seamstress, nurse, governess,
and writer. Her first book, titled Flower Fables (1854) consisted of a series of tales written for Ralph Waldo
Emerson's daughter Ellen. In 1860, she began writing for the Atlantic Monthly, but it wasn't until a series
of letters that she had sent home during 1862 and 1863 while serving as a nurse at the Union Hospital near
Washington, D.C. were published (Hospital Sketches) that her writing abilities were recognized.
Her novel Moods (1863) showed great promise.
Alcott's overwhelming success began in 1868 when Little Women was published. The novel was a semiautobiographical
account of her childhood years spent with sisters Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. Little Women was followed by the sequel
Good Wives (1869), which followed the March sisters into adulthood and their respective marriages.
In 1871, Alcott published Little Men, a story based on the nephews with whom Alcott lived for
a time in Concord. Jo's Boys (1886) completed the "March Family Saga."
In her later life, Alcott became an advocate of women's suffrage, and was the first woman to register to vote
in Concord. Alcott continued to write through the rest of her life, but the affects of
mercury poisoning, contracted during her service in the Civil War, eventually led to her death in
1888 at the age of 55. Her final resting place can be found on Author's Ridge in the
Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts. Her mother, father and sisters are buried nearby.
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