Writer, born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, USA. She was taught by her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, until 1848, and studied informally with family friends such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Theodore Parker. Residing in Boston and Concord, MD, she worked as a domestic servant, a teacher, and at other jobs to help support her family (185062), and during the Civil War she went to Washington, DC to serve as a nurse.
Unknown to most people, she had been publishing poems, short stories, thrillers, and juvenile tales since 1851, under the pen name Flora Fairfield. In 1862 she also adopted the pen name A M Barnard, and some of her melodramas were produced on Boston stages. But it was her account of her Civil War experiences, Hospital Sketches (1863), that confirmed her desire to be a serious writer. She began to publish stories under her real name in Atlantic Monthly and Lady's Companion, and took a brief trip to Europe in 1865 before becoming editor of a girls' magazine, Merry's Museum (1868). The great success of Little Women (186970) gave her financial independence and also created a demand for more books. For the rest of her life she turned out a steady stream of novels and short stories, mostly for young people, and drawn directly from her own family life. Other books include Little Men (1871), Eight Cousins (1875), and Jo's Boys (1886). She also tried her hand at adult novels, such as Work (1873) and A Modern Mephistopheles (1877), but did not have the literary talent to attract serious readers.
Like many women of her day and class, she supported women's suffrage and temperance, but she never found much happiness in her personal life. She grew impatient with the demands made on her as a successful writer, became the caretaker of her always impractical father, and was increasingly beset by physical ailments that led to a succession of remedies and healers. Sickly and lonely, she died at age 55 on the day of her father's funeral.
Louisa May Alcott|
Louisa May Alcott |
|
| Born: |
November 29, 1832 |
|---|---|
| Died: |
March 6, 1888 |
| Occupation(s): | Novelist |
| Nationality: | United States, New England |
| Writing period: | Civil War |
Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist.
Childhood and Early Works
Alcott was the daughter of noted Transcendentalist Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail May the third.
During her girlhood and early womanhood, she shared in her family's poverty and Transcendentalist ideals. The Alcott family moved to the Utopian Fruitlands community for a brief interval in 1843-1844, and then after its collapse to rented rooms, and subsequently a house in Concord purchased with her mother's inheritance and help from Emerson. In 1847 the family housed a fugitive slave for one week, and in 1848 Alcott read and admired the "Declaration of Sentiments" published by the Seneca Falls Convention on women's rights.
In 1860, Alcott began writing for the Atlantic Monthly, and she was nurse in the Union Hospital at Georgetown, D.C., for six weeks in 1862-1863.
A lesser-known part of her work are the passionate, fiery novels and stories she wrote, usually under the pseudonym A. These works, such as A Long Fatal Love Chase and Pauline's Passion and Punishment, were known in the Victorian Era as "potboilers" or "blood-and-thunder tales" and were later referred to as "dangerous for little minds" in Alcott's own novel Little Women.
In contrast, Alcott also produced moralistic and wholesome stories for children, and, with the exceptions of the semi-autobiographical tale Work (1873), and the anonymous novelette A Modern Mephistopheles (1877), which attracted suspicion that it was authored by Julian Hawthorne, she did not return to creating works for adults.
Literary Success and Later Life
Louisa May Alcott's overwhelming success dated from the appearance of the first part of Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, (1868) a semiautobiographical account of her childhood years along with her sisters in Concord, Massachusetts.
Although the Jo character in Little Women was based on Louisa May Alcott, Alcott, unlike Jo, never married.
In 1879 her younger sister, May, died, and Louisa May took in May's daughter, Louisa May Nieriker ("Lulu"), who was two years old.
In her later life, Alcott became an advocate of women's suffrage, and was the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Massachusetts.
Despite worsening health, Alcott wrote through the rest of her life, finally succumbing to the after effects of mercury poisoning contracted during her American Civil War service (she had received calomel treatments for the effects of typhoid).
The story of her life and career was initially told in Ednah D. Cheney's Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters and Journals (Boston, 1889) and then in Madeleine B.
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