Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown (now part of Philadelphia), the second of four daughters of Transcendentalist educator Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail May.

The Alcott family moved to Boston in 1834 and later settled in Concord, where Louisa was educated largely by her father with guidance from family friends Emerson and Thoreau.

In 1843-1844 the Alcotts joined Bronson Alcott's short-lived utopian commune Fruitlands in Harvard, Massachusetts, an experience Louisa later satirized in 'Transcendental Wild Oats'.

Alcott's first book, Flower Fables, a collection of tales originally written for Emerson's daughter Ellen, was published in 1854.

Alcott worked as a nurse at the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown from December 1862 until typhoid fever forced her home; the experience produced Hospital Sketches (1863).

The first part of Little Women, based on Alcott's childhood with her sisters, appeared in September 1868 and was an immediate commercial success, with a second part following in 1869.

Alcott continued the March family saga with Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886).

An active suffragist, Alcott became the first woman registered to vote in Concord, Massachusetts, in an 1879 school committee election.

Alcott died of a stroke in Boston at age 55, two days after the death of her father, and was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord.