Little Women

Louisa M. Alcoa, (29th November, 1832, Germantown, 6th March, 1888, Pennsylvania Boston, Massachusetts), Was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet, best known for the children's books, especially the classic Little Women (1868) and its sequels Little Men (1871) and. Jo's Boys (1886). She was the daughter of transcendentalist and educator Amos Bronson Alcoa and social worker Abby May. She was the second of four daughters—Anna Bronson Alcoa was the eldest; Elizabeth Sewall Alcoa and Abigail May Alcoa were the two youngest, in 1834, her family moved to Boston Where her father established an experimental school and joined the Transcendental club with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Amos Bronson Alcott's opinions on education and tough views on child-rearing as well as his moments of mental instablitiy shaped young Louisa mind with a desire to achieve perfection, a goal of the transcendentalists. Louisa spent most of her life in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts, where she grew up in the company, of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, and Henry David Thoreau. Her education was largely under the direction of her father, for a time at his innovative Temple School in Boston and, later, at home. Louisa 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 her father had founded, Louisa's lifelong concern for the welfare of her family began. She taught briefly, worked as a domestic servent, and finally began to write. During the Civil War, she went to Washington to work as a nurse, but she contracted typhoid from unsanitary hospital conditions and was sent back to home. She was never completely will again.