Alcott, Louisa May
Louisa May (1832-1888), an American story writer. She was the daughter of Amos Bronson Alcott, an educator and lecturer of some note, an intimate friend of Emerson. She was born at Germantown, Pennsylvania. When she was two years old, her parents moved to Boston, and six years later they settled at Concord. Here this gifted woman spent the greater part of her life, doing housework, waiting on her father, composing magazine articles, and writing stories for children. In 1862 she went to Washington as a war hospital nurse. On her return she published Hospital Sketches, which proved that her real talent lay in telling simple, wholesome stories of commonplace people. Up to this time she had written only "pot boilers," most of them of a sensational character, having no permanent value. In 1868 Little Women was published. Upon this story Miss Alcott's real reputation rests. It is the most popular juvenile book ever produced in America. Sixty thousand copies were sold the first year. Little Men, written in the same vein, is also a favorite. Other popular stories are Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, Old Fashioned Girl, Under the Lilacs, Jack and Jill, Jo's Boys. Miss Alcott published also several volumes of short stories. Aunt Jo's Scrap Bag, Silver Pitchers, Proverb Stories, Spinning Wheel Stories, and Lulu's Library are among them.
Little Women is the story of the lives of Miss Alcott and her three sisters. Some one has said of it that it seems to be an addition to one's actual experiences, rather than to one's memories of fiction. This gives the keynote to the popularity of Miss Alcott's stories. They are faulty from a literary point of view. They have little plot or artistic qualities of any sort. They are simply wholesome, happy, breezy stories of boys and girls who are very natural, very faulty, but who are growing continually toward their ideals.
"Little Women is the world-photograph of the New England home and the American girl." Miss Alcott's books still sell at the rate of 100,000 a year, and of Little Women, alone, written over forty years ago, 20,000 copies were sold in 1908. The famous quartette of girls are all dead now, but the originals of the Demi and Daisy of the book, and a daughter of Amy still live and divide the royalties accruing from their aunt's labor.
It was Miss Alcott's custom, when she had some important piece of writing on hand, to go into Boston. There, in a little garret room surrounded by her books and papers, she would put her whole heart and mind to the work till it was finished. She died in Concord two days after the death of her father. The old Alcott home and the Alcott lot in the burying ground, near the graves of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Emerson, are seen by many visitors. Louisa May Alcott, Her Life, Letters and Journals, by Ednah D. Cheney, is almost as entertaining a story as any written by Miss Alcott herself.