Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist, best known for the novel Little Women (1868).

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. Little Men (1871) treated similarly the characters and ways of her nephews who lived with her at Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts. Jo's Boys (1886) completed the "March Family Saga." Most of her later volumes, An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Aunt Jo's Scrap Bag (6 vols., 1871-1879),Eight Cousins and its sequel Rose in Bloom (1876), and others, followed in the line of Little Women, remaining popular with her large and loyal public.

Related Topics:
Little Women - 1868 - Little Men - 1871 - 1886 - 1870 - 1879

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Despite worsening health, Alcott wrote through the rest of her life, finally succumbing to the aftereffects of mercury poisoning contracted during her Civil War service. She died in Boston on March 6, 1888, two days after visiting her father on his deathbed.

Related Topics:
Mercury - Poisoning - Boston

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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. Stern's seminal biography Louisa May Alcott (University of Oklahoma Press, 1950).

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