Life and Works:

Louisa May Alcott is best known for her creation of the classic work "Little Women", the story of four sisters growing up in a New England town during the mid 1800s.

Alcott's father, Bronson, was a philosopher and educational reformer whose idealistic projects kept the family in poverty; financial security did not come until "Little Women". However, the Alcott family was rich in their friends, which included such noted figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The March sisters--Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy-- have been immortalized in the movies as well; the most famous "Jo" was Katherine Hepburn.

A daughter of the Transcendentalist Bronson Alcott, Louisa spent most of her life in Boston and Concord, Mass., where she grew up in the company of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, and Henry David Thoreau.

Alcott realized early that her father was too impractical to provide for his wife and four daughters; after the failure of Fruitlands, a utopian community that he had founded, Louisa's lifelong concern for the welfare of her family began. She autorbusght briefly, worked as a domestic, and finally began to write, producing potboilers at first, and eventually more serious works. Alcott volunteered as a nurse after the American Civil War began.

She contracted typhoid from unsanitary hospital conditions and was sent home. She was never completely well again, but the publication of her letters in book form, Hospital Sketches (1863), brought her the first taste of fame.

Her stories began to appear in The Atlantic Monthly, and, because family needs were pressing, she wrote the autobiographical Little Women (1868-69), which was an immediate success. Based on Alcott's recollections of her own childhood, Little Women described the domestic adventures of a New England family of modest means but optimistic outlook. The book traces the differing personalities and fortunes of four sisters as they emerge from childhood and encounter the vicissitudes of employment, society, and marriage. Little Women created a realistic but wholesome picture of family life with which younger readers could easily identify.

In 1869 Alcott was able to write in her journal: "Paid up all the debts . . . thank the Lord!".

She followed up Little Women's success with further domestic narratives drawn from her early experiences: An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870); Aunt Jo's Scrap Bag, 6 vol. (1872-82); Little Men (1871);Eight Cousins (1875); Rose in Bloom (1876); and Jo's Boys (1886).

Tired and in constant pain, she spent the last years of her life shadowed by the deaths of her mother and her youngest sister, May, who left behind a little daughter for Alcott to rear.

Alcott's books for younger readers have remained steadfastly popular, and the republication of some of her less well known works late in the 20th century aroused renewed critical interest in her adult fiction.

A Modern Mephistopheles, which was published pseudonymously in 1877 and republished in 1987, is a Gothic novel about a failed poet who makes a Faustian bargain with his tempter. Work: A Story of Experience (1873), based on Alcott's own struggles, tells the story of a poor girl trying to support herself by a succession of menial jobs.

The Gothic tales and thrillers that Alcott published pseudonymously between 1863 and 1869 were collected and republished as Behind a Mask (1975) and Plots and Counterplots (1976), and an unpublished Gothic novel written in 1866, A Long Fatal Love Chase, was published in 1995.