Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) was an American novelist, born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, on 29 November 1832, best known for Little Women (1868-1869); she died in Boston on 6 March 1888.

Alcott was the second of four daughters of the transcendentalist teacher Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail May, and she grew up in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts. She worked as a teacher, seamstress, governess and servant while publishing poems and stories, and her first book, Flower Fables, appeared in 1854. Six weeks as a Union nurse in Georgetown in 1862 and 1863 ended with typhoid fever but produced Hospital Sketches (1863). Under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard she also wrote sensational thrillers such as Behind a Mask (1866).

At the request of Thomas Niles of the Boston firm Roberts Brothers, she wrote Little Women at Orchard House in Concord in 1868, taking somewhere between ten weeks and three months by different accounts. The first volume came out on 30 September 1868 and the second in April 1869; in Britain the second part was given the title Good Wives by its publisher. The March family story continued in Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886), and her other books include Eight Cousins (1875). She published more than 30 books and collections.

For collectors

The key book is the Roberts Brothers first edition of Little Women, Part One (Boston, 1868), illustrated by her sister May Alcott. Its first printing of 2,000 copies sold out quickly. The second volume followed from the same publisher in April 1869.