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Louisa May Alcott

© Megan Drummond

She was born on the 333rd day of the year. She has had books on the bestseller list for over 100 years. And she has a crater on Venus named after her. Who is she?

Louisa May Alcott is who she is.

On November 29, 1832, the second daughter of Amos Bronson and Abigail May Alcott was born. Two years later, the family moved from Germantown, Pennsylvania, to Massachusetts, where Louisa lived the majority of her life migrating between Boston and Concord. Louisa’s childhood in the Massachusetts countryside served as the basis for her most famous novel, Little Women.

Louisa was a very versatile writer who began her career at a young age. At the encouragement of her father, she began keeping a diary of her thoughts and feelings. Many of the events in her diary served as ideas for the characters and plots of her many works in later life.

Louisa wrote many plays, poems and short stories as a teenager. Her first published work appeared in 1851, when Louisa was just 19 years old. She published a poem entitled Sunlight under the pseudonym Flora Fairfield. A short year later, Louisa publisher her first short story, The Rival Painters: A Tale of Rome. At age 23, four years later in 1854, Louisa May Alcott published her first book. Flower Fables was a collection of fairy tales and poems that she first created to entertain Ellen, the daughter of one of her contemporaries, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Flower Fables was the first book that Louisa got published, but it was not the first book she had written. At age 17, she wrote The Inheritance, a novel that remained hidden and unpublished for nearly 150 years, until two researchers stumbled upon the handwritten manuscript in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Louisa is best know for her story of the March family, which she told in three books: Little Women, Little Men and Jo’s Boys.

Like the protagonist in her famous novel, Louisa also dabbled in the popular “blood and thunder” tales of the time. Many of these stories appeared in popular periodicals of the day. For some, Louisa chose to use the pseudonym A.M. Barnard; for others, she chose to remain completely anonymous.

Louisa’s career was not limited to writing. In her late teens, she began to work as a teacher and stayed in that position for several years. She also occasionally worked as a seamstress. In 1862, she traveled to Washington, D.C., to work as a Civil War nurse at the Union Hospital in Georgetown. Her experiences here served as the content for Hospital Sketches, her poignant, first person account of Civil War hospitals. Louisa server briefly as editor of a children’s magazine and, being a feminist at heart, fought extensively for women’s right, especially suffrage. In fact, she was the first woman registered to vote in Concord, Massachusetts.