Louisa May Alcott

AsA.M. Barnard: Behind a Mask, or a Womans Power (1866)The Abbots Ghost, or Maurice Trehernes Temptation (1867)A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866first published in 1995)First published anonymously:A Modern Mephistopheles (1877)Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania on November 29, 1832. She and her three sisters Anna, Elizabeth and May were educated by their father, philosopher/teacher, She had a rich imagination and her stories were o... ften turned into melodramas that she and her sisters would act out for friends. Louisa preferred to play the "lurid" parts in these plays, "the villains, the ghosts, the bandits, and the disdainful queens." At the age of 15, troubled by the poverty that plagued her family, she vowed: "I'm going to do something by and by. Take care of what, teach, sew, act, write, help the family; and I'm going to be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I will!" Her first book Flower Fables was published at the age of 22 in 1854. Hospital Sketches (1863) was a milestone along her literary path, based on the letters she wrote home from her post as a nurse in Washington, DC as a nurse during the Civil War. When Louisa was 35 years old, her publisher Thomas Niles in Boston asked her to write "a book for girls." Little Women was written at Orchard House from May to July 1868. Jo March was the first American juvenile heroine to act out of her own individuality; a living, breathing person rather than the idealized stereotype then prevalent in children's fiction. In all, Louisa published more than 30 books and story collections. She died only two days after her father on March 6, 1888, and is buried at Concord's Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.READ MORE