Louisa May Alcott

Although she is best known for her 1868 novel Little Women and its subsequent sequels, which fictionalized many scenes from her childhood, Louisa May Alcott wrote fifteen other novels, some published under own name and some under pseudonyms, as well as serialized thrillers and detective fiction, short stories and poems, and actively worked as a journalist.

Apart from her artistic endeavors, Louisa was also immersed in various social reforms of the day. Along with her mother and sisters, she became an ardent abolitionist, and was one of the members of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society. Louisa served as nurse at a Union Hospital during the Civil War, wrote for the Boston-based abolition newspapers, and was one of the founders of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union in Boston.

Associated with many of the leading intellectuals of the era and the Transcendentalists in Concord, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau and others, Louisa May Alcott was also part of the developing discourse of the day.