Louisa
Alcott
was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, on 29th November, 1832. Alcott
was educated by her father, Bronson Alcott, the head of Temple School
in Boston. As a young
woman she was befriended by Ralph Waldo Emerson
and Henry David Thoreau, she
wrote her first book, Flower
Fables,
when she was only sixteen.
During the American Civil War Alcott
worked as a nurse in a Union Army hospital
(1861-63). However, after contracting typhoid
in 1863 she was sent home. She documented her war experiences in her
book Hospital
Sketches
(1863). Alcott also had some of her short stories published in Atlantic
Monthly.
Alcott achieved literary success with the publication of her autobiographical
novel Little
Women
(1868) and its sequel, Good
Wives
(1869). Other novels aimed at the youth market included An
Old Fashioned Girl (1870),
Little
Men
(1871), Eight
Cousins
(1876) and Rose
in Bloom
(1876). Alcott later described these books as "moral pap for
the young". Alcott also wrote two feminist novels, Work,
A Study of Experience (1873), and A
Modern Mephistopheles
(1877). Louisa Alcott
died in Boston on 6th March, 1888.
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