[1] His father, Obedience Alcox (1776–1847), was a farmer; in the 1820s, like many members of the family, he altered the spelling of his last name, which on his tombstone appears as "Obid.

[a] His mother was Anna Andrus (1777–1864), who was the daughter of a Revolutionary War soldier and William's most important educational influence.

[3] Alcott lived in Dedham, Massachusetts, where he was the superintendent of the Sunday School at the Allin Congregational Church.

[4] He was known to walk barefoot on summer mornings from his home in the village up to Federal Hill to obtain a bucket of milk.

Alcott at first worked as an assistant to Woodbridge[10] for which he was paid twelve dollars a month to check facts and improve maps.

[12] While still teaching he had begun to contribute articles to newspapers and started work on the book that would become The Young Man's Guide.

For a time they shared a house, Cottage Place, with the family of his old friend and cousin Amos Bronson Alcott.

[16] A second edition was published in 1849 "with an added cookbook and medical testimonies supporting what today would be called a vegan diet.

"[17] In his book, Eating History: Thirty Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine, Andrew F. Smith attributed Alcott's Vegetable Diet as being "America's first vegetarian cookbook.

"[18] In 2020, journalist Avery Yale Kamila wrote: "The book is considered a seminal work in the cannon of American vegetarian literature.

In 1836, he wrote a letter defending Grahamism to the editor of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, published on May 4, 1836.

[citation needed] In Boston, Alcott edited the Moral Reformer (1835–1839), a journal dedicated to eliminating intemperance, gluttony, and licentiousness.

[28] Alcott and Sylvester Graham founded the American Physiological Society (ASP) in 1837, with the purpose of “integrating a Grahamite lifestyle into a larger physiologically focused ideology.”[31] The ASP sought to make the study of health access to all citizens and promoted a vegetarian diet.

[33] In all, he wrote about one hundred books, which were influential in reforming educational methods and improving people's physical and moral well-being.