Louisa May Alcott

"I want to do something splendid,
something heroic or wonderful,
that won't be forgotten after i'm dead
I think i shall write books."

Renowned for her classic novels LITTLE WOMEN and LITTLE MEN, Louisa May Alcott's passion for literature and the intellectual life were shaped in the bosom of her family. One of four daughters of the prominent Transcendentalist and pioneering educational innovator, Bronson Alcott, and his wife, Abigail May, who distinguished herself in the Abolitionist, Suffrage, and other reform causes of the period, Louisa May was born in Pennsylvania, but grew up in Boston and later in Concord, where she associated directly with her parents' circle which included the Emersons, Thoreaus, Hawthornes, and Ripleys. Accustomed to the straightened circumstances to which her father's idealism perpetually condemned the family, Louisa began to write stories at an early age to supplement the family income. Said Emerson of her genteel novels, "She is a natural source of stories... She is and is to be, the poet of children. She knows their angels."

But as recent scholarship has demonstrated, the mature Louisa May also knew about the demons which people the human soul. Her tales of Gothic fiction, written behind the mask of pseudonyms, reveal a psychological depth that compares favorably with the best writers of the genre such as Poe and Hawthorne.

Before her death in 1888, her book sales had reached the one million mark and she had realized the considerable sum of $200,000 from her fiction. Unlike their daughter, Louisa's parents, Bronson and Abigail May ,were never to know financial ease; rather they always experienced life as a continuing struggle to maintain uncompromising moral and social ideals, while staying one step ahead of poverty.

Author of novels, short stories, and poems. In her youth, held a variety of jobs, including teacher, seamstress, and domestic servant. Born on November 29, 1832, in Germantown, died on March 6, 1888, in Boston; buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, MA.