Louisa - May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832, Germantown, Pennsylvania - March 6, 1888, Boston) was an author known for her children's books. The daughter of Amos Bronson, she spent most of her life in Concord and Boston, growing up in the environment of the Transcendentalists. Thoreau and Emerson were her early friends—Hawthorne was a neighbor—and Oliver Wendell Holmes and Margaret Fuller were frequent visitors. From a young age, she also realized that her father lacked the practical spirit needed to support his wife and four daughters. After the failure of his Fruitlands community experiment, she took on this burden herself, working as a teacher (a job she hated), a domestic helper for a short time, and eventually, writing novels. A fervent abolitionist, she volunteered as a nurse when the Civil War broke out until she fell ill with typhoid and had to return home. Her letters from the hospital, "Hospital Sketches" (1863), were her first book to gain recognition. Under the pressure of her family's debts, she wrote the autobiographical "Little Women" (1868-69), which was an immediate success. In 1869, she was able to write in her journal: "All our debts are paid, and we have enough to live comfortably... This may have cost me my health; but as long as I am alive, I have plenty to do...". More books followed, based on her childhood experiences, such as "Aunt Jo's Scrap Bag" (six volumes, 1872-82), "An Old-fashioned Girl" (1870), "Little Men" (1871), "Eight Cousins" (1875), and "Jo's Boys" (1886). In her later years, although free from financial worries, her health deteriorated, and she was struck by the death of her younger sister May shortly after childbirth, whose daughter she took in. She settled young Louisa near her older, divorced sister Anna, her father, and her two nephews in Boston, appointed her nephew John as her heir, and distanced herself from them, trying once more to write. However, two days after her father's death on March 4, 1888, she herself passed away at the age of 56 and was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord.