Louisa May Alcott: A Brief Biographical Sketch

Louisa May Alcott is one of America's best-known writers of juvenile Her description of the experience in Hospital Sketches () brought her work to the .
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They moved to the Utopian Fruitlands community for a brief interval in , and then after its collapse to rented rooms, and subsequently a house in Concord purchased with her mother's inheritence and help from Emerson. Alcott's early education had included lessons from the naturalist Henry David Thoreau but had chiefly been in the hands of her father. She later described these early years in a newspaper sketch entitled "Silver Pitchers , which relates the experiences of her family during their experiment in "plain living and high thinking" at Fruitlands.

As she grew older, she developed as both an abolitionist and a feminist. In the family housed a fugitive slave for one week, and in Alcott read and admired the "Declaration of Sentiments" published by the Seneca Falls Convention on women's rights.

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Due to the family's poverty, she began Work at an early age as an occasional teacher, seamstress, governess, domestic help, and writer, her first book was Flower Fables , Tales originally written for Ellen Emerson, daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Her letters home, revised and published in the Commonwealth and collected as Moods , was also considered promising. 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 Little Women. Their protagonists are willful and relentless in their pursuit of their own aims, which often include revenge on those who have humiliated or thwarted them. These works achieved immediate commercial success and remain highly readable today. In contrast, Alcott also produced moralistic and wholesome stories for children, and, with the exceptions of the semi-autobiographical tale A Modern Mephistopheles , which attracted suspicion that it was authored by Julian Hawthorne, she did not return to creating works for adults.

Louisa May Alcott Biography

Louisa May Alcott's overwhelming success dated from the appearance of the first part of Little Women, remaining popular with her large and loyal public. In her later life, Alcott became an advocate of women's suffrage, and was the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Massachusetts. November 29 , Germantown, Pennsylvania, United States. March 6 , Boston, Massachusetts, United States.

She was a free spirited girl in her childhood who wanted to become a successful actress and travel the world but her family responsibilities kept her engaged throughout her life. Her father was an abolitionist who was unable to provide well for the family which made poverty her greatest enemy.

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She worked as a housemaid, teacher and nurse to support her family before she started writing. It was inspired by her own experiences, relationship with her sisters and their journey from childhood to womanhood together. Writing had been her passion since childhood and she eventually became a literary genius through her novels.

Louisa May Alcott

Quotes By Louisa May Alcott. By using this site, you agree to allow cookies to be placed. She was born on November 29, in Germantown to Amos Bronson Alcott, a transcendentalist and educator, and Abby May, a social worker. Her father was unable to support the family because of his impractical nature.


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Her family lived for some time in the Utopian Fruitlands, an agrarian commune founded by her after in Massachusetts. She started working quite early in her life to fulfill the needs of her family.