Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott (1832 to 1888) was an American novelist, short story writer and poet, remembered above all for Little Women, published in 1868, and for its sequels Good Wives, Little Men and Jo's Boys. She was raised in New England by transcendentalist parents, the educator Amos Bronson Alcott and the social worker Abigail May, and grew up among thinkers such as Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau. Her family often struggled for money, and she wrote partly to support them. Her book Hospital Sketches, drawn from her service as a nurse in the American Civil War, brought her early critical success in the 1860s, while pen names such as A. M. Barnard covered the lurid short stories and sensation novels she wrote for adult readers. Little Women draws loosely on her childhood with her three sisters and has been adapted many times for film and television. Alcott was also an abolitionist, a feminist and an active supporter of temperance and women's suffrage.