A Biography On Lousia May Alcot :: essays research papers

Louisa May Alcott was born on November 29, 1832, in Germantown, Pennsylvania. When she was almost 2 years old, Louisa's family moved to Massachusetts, the state where she lived the bulk of her life. The family moved many times over the years, usually back and forth between Boston and Concord (Mass.). Some notable places Louisa lived were "Fruitlands" in Harvard, Massachusetts; "Hillside" in Concord; and "Orchard House," also in Concord. "Fruitlands" was the site of her father's attempt at Utopian living, which she wrote about in Transcendental Wild Oats, thirty years later in 1873. Louisa's childhood at "Hillside" (later renamed "Wayside" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, when he lived there) served as the basis for the action in her most popular novel, Little Women, which she wrote as an adult living in "Orchard House." Interestingly, these latter two houses were located next door to each other, with a walking path through the woods between. They are both still standing and open for tours in Concord. She was a versatile writer who started at an early age. At the encouragement of her father, she kept a diary as a child--which probably helped her to discover her love and talent for writing and surely provided ideas later for her various plots and characters. As a teenager, Louisa wrote several plays, poems, and short stories. She achieved publication for the first time at age nineteen, with a poem entitled "Sunlight" (1851), which she wrote under the pseudonym, "Flora Fairfield". The title of Ms. Alcott's first published short story was "The Rival Painters: A Tale of Rome" (1852), and her first published book was Flower Fables (1854), a collection of short fairy-tale stories and poems which she had originally created to entertain Ralph Waldo Emerson's daughter Ellen. Louisa May Alcott wrote her first novel, The Inheritance, at age seventeen, but it went unpublished for nearly 150 years until 1997, after two researchers (Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy) stumbled across the handwritten manuscript in the Houghton Library at Harvard University . Of course, Ms. Alcott is best known for a different novel, Little Women, which she wrote in two parts. The first volume, subtitled Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, was published in 1868, and the second volume, alternately titled Good Wives, was published in 1869. Like Jo in Little Women, Louisa also wrote many "blood and thunder" tales, which were published in popular periodicals of the day.