Louisa May Alcott

EARLY LIFE

Louisa May Alcott was born on November 29, 1832 in Germantown, which is now part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was the second of four daughters of transcendentalist and educator Amos Bronson Alcott and social worker Abby May.

Louisa grew up in the company of her father's friends, the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson and the naturalist Henry David Thoreau. Emerson said prophetically of young Louisa's early attempts to write. "She is a natural source of stories... she is and is to be the poet of children."

When Louisa was 12 she and her family moved into the Concord, Massachusetts, home they named "Hillside" on April 1, 1845. They sold it seven years later to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who renamed it The Wayside.

She enjoyed visiting Emerson's library, excursions into nature with Henry David Thoreau and theatricals in the barn at Hillside (which Louisa had written).

A tomboy, Louisa liked climbing trees and leaping fences.

Headshot of Louisa May Alcott at age 20

WRITING CAREER

Alcott could write with both her left and right hand.

Her first published work was a poem Sunlight, which was published in Peterson's Magazine in 1852.

She originally turned to writing to support her impoverished family and earned $2,000 with her 1863 compilation Hospital Sketches. The work was based on letters Alcott sent home during the six weeks she spent as a volunteer army nurse during the American Civil War in Georgetown.

Her most famous book was Little Women. This largely autobiographical novel was penned in six weeks at home during the summer of 1868. The story about four teenage sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March growing up in a Victorian New England village was based on Louisa and her sisters coming of age.

Alcott wrote Little Women for girls but was skeptical it would find an audience because she "never liked girls nor knew many, except my sisters; but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting though I doubt it."

Jo March, who was a partial self portrait, was the first American juvenile heroine to be shown acting from her own individuality.

An immediate success, Little Women instantly sold more than 2,000 copies and soon made Alcott famous. It has since been translated into 20 languages.

Alcott wrote three sequels to Little Women - Little Women Part 2 (1869), Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886).

Alcott penned over 300 books in different genres. These included several racy pot boilers under a pseudonym A. M. Barnard, such as A Long Fatal Love Chase and Pauline's Passion and Punishment. These adult novels were of the type referred to in Little Women as "dangerous for little minds."

By the time of Alcott's death her book sales had reached the one million mark. And she'd realized $200,000 from her fiction.

Louisa May Alcott

NURSING 

Alcott served as a nurse during the American Civil War in a union hospital at Georgetown, now part of Washington DC. The letters that she wrote to her family were later published as Hospital Sketches. This was her first book which got critical recognition.

Alcott contacted typhoid pneumonia from the unsanitary conditions in the union hospital. The doctors used calomel, a drug laden with mercury, to cure her. A side effect of Alcott's treatment was losing her hair and numerous mouth sores. She never fully recovered her health and after returning home to Concord, Alcott suffered mental depressions and hallucinations in which a Spaniard clad in black leaped through her bedroom window at night.

BELIEFS

Alcott was a free-thinker and addressed a number of women's issues, including protesting against the corset.

Later in life, Alcott became active in the women's suffrage movement and was the first female register to vote in at home town of Concord in 1879.

RELATIONSHIPS

Alcott never married, but in 1865, while travelling in Europe, she met a Polish musician named Ladislas Wisniewski, whom she nicknamed Laddie. The flirtation between Laddie and Louisa culminated in them spending two weeks together in Paris.

When her youngest sister May died in 1879, Alcott took her two year old daughter, Louisa May Nieriker ("Lulu"), into care.

DEATH

Louisa May Alcott died March 6, 1888, at the age of 55, on the day of her father's funeral. She succumbed to the lingering after-effects of mercury poisoning, contracted during her Civil War service.

She was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery at Bedford Street in Concord, Massachusetts. Henry Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau can be found at the same cemetery.