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A DAUGHTER OF THE TRANSCENDENTALIST Bronson Alcott, 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. 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 Alcott’s lifelong concern for the welfare of her family began. She taught briefly, worked as a domestic, and finally began to write.

Alcott produced potboilers at first and many of her stories—notably those signed “A.M. Barnard”—were lurid and violent tales. The latter works are unusual in their depictions of women as strong, self-reliant, and imaginative. She volunteered as a nurse after the American Civil War began, but she contracted typhoid from unsanitary hospital conditions and was sent home. She was never completely well again. The publication of her letters in book form, Hospital Sketches (1863), brought her the first taste of fame.

Alcott’s 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 her recollections of her own childhood, Little Women describes 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!”

Except for a European tour in 1870 and a few briefer trips to New York, she spent the last two decades of her life in Boston and Concord, caring for her mother, who died in 1877 after a lengthy illness, and her increasingly helpless father. Late in life she adopted her namesake, Louisa May Nieriker, daughter of her late sister, May. Her own health, never robust, also declined, and she died in Boston two days after her father’s death.