Louisa May Alcott (/ˈɔːlkət, -kɒt/; November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet best known for writing the novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels Good Wives (1869), Little Men (1871), and Jo's Boys (1886).

Raised in New England by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott, she grew up among many well-known intellectuals of the day, including Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau.

In the 1860s she began to achieve critical success for her writing with the publication of Hospital Sketches, a book based on her service as a nurse in the American Civil War.

Louisa May Alcott has been the subject of numerous biographies, novels, and a documentary, and has influenced other writers and public figures such as Ursula K. Le Guin and Theodore Roosevelt.

[7] The family moved to Boston in 1834,[8] where Louisa's father established the experimental Temple School[9] and met with other transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

"[26] Her favorite authors included Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sir Walter Scott, Fredericka Bremer, Thomas Carlyle, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Goethe, and John Milton, Friedrich Schiller, and Germaine de Staele.

[41] Louisa later described these early years in a newspaper sketch titled "Transcendental Wild Oats", reprinted in Silver Pitchers (1876), which relates the family's experiment in "plain living and high thinking" at Fruitlands.

[46] After the collapse of Fruitlands in early 1844, the family rented in nearby Still River,[47] where Louisa attended public school and wrote and directed plays that her sisters and friends performed.

[67] When James Richardson came to Abigail in the winter of 1851 seeking a companion for his frail sister and elderly father who would also be willing to do light housekeeping,[68] Louisa volunteered to serve in the house filled with books, music, artwork, and good company on Highland Avenue.

"[69] Richardson's response was to assign her more laborious duties, including chopping wood, scrubbing the floors, shoveling snow, drawing water from the well, and blacking his boots.

[74] In September 1851 Louisa's poem "Sunlight" appeared in Peterson's Magazine under the name Flora Fairchild, making it her first successful publication.

[98] Unable to find work and filled with despair, Louisa contemplated suicide by drowning, but she decided to "take Fate by the throat and shake a living out of her.

[102] Soon after turning thirty in 1862, Alcott applied to the U. S. Sanitary Commission, run by Dorothea Dix, and on December 11 was assigned to work in the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown, Washington, D. C.[103] When she left, Bronson felt as if he was "sending [his] only son to the war".

[104] When she arrived she discovered that conditions in the hospital were poor, with over-crowded and filthy quarters, bad food, unstable beds, and insufficient ventilation.

[129] Alcott suffered from chronic health problems in her later years,[130] including vertigo, dyspepsia, headaches, fatigue, and pain in the limbs,[131] diagnosed as neuralgia in her lifetime.

[139] As Alcott's health declined, she often lived at Dunreath Place, a convalescent home run by Dr. Rhoda Lawrence for which she had provided financial support in the past.

[141] In 1887 she legally adopted Anna's son, John Pratt, and made him heir to her royalties, then created a will that left her money to her remaining family.

[149] Encouraged by Sanborn and Moncure Conway, Louisa revised and published the letters she wrote while serving as a nurse in the Boston anti-slavery paper Commonwealth, later collecting them as Hospital Sketches (1863, republished with additions in 1869).

[155] Louisa Alcott began editing the children's magazine Merry's Museum to help pay off family debts[156] incurred while she toured Europe as the companion of wealthy invalid Anna Weld in 1865–66.

[161] She was hesitant to write it because she felt she knew more about boys than she did about girls,[162] but she eventually set to work on her semi-autobiographical novel Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (1868).

Roberta Trites called it "fascinating and thorough", though she said it needed more background information about the essayists,[195] while fellow Alcott scholar Gregory Eiselein praised Shealy's use of original accounts.

"[197] She was referring to John Matteson's Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.

Taylor Barnes of The Christian Science Monitor generally praised Reisen's biography but wrote that its "microscopic examination" of Alcott's life becomes confusing.

[209] Louisa May Alcott scholar Leona Rostenberg suggests that she published these stories under pseudonyms to preserve her reputation as an author of realistic and juvenile fiction.

The detective on the case, Antoine Dupres, is a parody of Poe's Dupin who is less concerned with solving the crime than in setting up a way to reveal the solution with a dramatic flourish.

[242] She read and admired the Declaration of Sentiments published by the Seneca Falls Convention on women's rights, and became the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Massachusetts in a school board election on March 9, 1879.

[251] Along with Elizabeth Stoddard, Rebecca Harding Davis, Anne Moncure Crane, and others, Alcott was part of a group of female authors during the Gilded Age who addressed women's issues in a modern and candid manner.

[252] Alcott also joined Sorosis, where members discussed health and dress reform for women,[253] and she helped found Concord's first temperance society.

[266] It was directed by Nancy Porter and written by Harriet Reisen, who wrote the script based on primary sources from Alcott's life.

[280] Cynthia Ozick calls herself a "Jo-of-the-future", and Patti Smith explains, "[I]t was Louisa May Alcott who provided me with a positive view of my female destiny.