╖PARA »PAR@ ` TEXT ` Alcott, Louisa May1832╨1888novelistBorn in Germantown, Pennsylvania, on November 29, 1832, Louisa May Alcott was the daughter of Amos Bronson Alcott, educator and philosopher. She grew up in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts, and from earliest age was on familiar terms with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau (who tutored her for a time), Theodore Parker, and others of the Transcendentalist circle. Her education was largely at the hands of her father, for a time in his innovative Temple School in Boston and later at home. In her youth she began to assume some responsibility for the welfare of her family. To relieve her mother of a portion of the burden of making up for her father╒s improvidence, she did sewing, worked as a domestic, taught school, and, from 1851, began publishing under pseudonyms poems, stories, and sketches in various periodicals. Many of her stories, notably those signed ╥A. M. Barnard,╙ were lurid and violent tales of adventure. In 1854 she published her first book, Flower Fables. During the winter of 1862╨1863 she was briefly a volunteer nurse in the Civil War hospitals of Washington, D.C., and her letters home during that time formed the basis for her first successful book, Hospital Sketches, 1863. Her first novel, Moods, published in 1864 but written four years earlier, was less successful; but her stories and poems for children continued to appear, and in 1867 she became editor of a children╒s magazine, Merry╒s Museum. At the urging of her publisher she reluctantly undertook a novel for young girls. Published in two parts in 1868╨1869 under the title Little Women, the book was an immediate and phenomenal success, selling 60,000 copies in its first year and assuring the Alcott family╒s financial security. Little Women was patently autobiographical and in its warmth and homely detail captured forever the period╒s ideal of middle-class domestic life. An Old-Fashioned Girl followed in 1870, Little Men in 1871, six volumes of stories and sketches under the title Aunt Jo╒s Scrap Bag in 1872╨1882, a second adult novel, Work, in 1873, Eight Cousins in 1875 and a sequel Rose in Bloom in 1876, Silver Pitchers in 1876, A Modern Mephistopheles, an adult novel published anonymously in 1877, Under the Lilacs in 1878, Jack and Jill in 1880, Proverb Stories in 1882, Spinning-Wheel Stories in 1884, and three volumes of Lulu╒s Library in 1886╨1889. Throughout her last twenty years, except for a European tour in 1870 and a few briefer trips to New York, she lived in Boston and Concord, devoting herself to the care of her mother, who died after a lengthy illness in 1877, and her increasingly helpless father; late in life she also adopted the children of two of her sisters who died prematurely. Her own health, never robust, declined as well. She took some interest in the cause of woman suffrage and in other reforms. The strain of caring for her father in his last illness, added to her exhaustion and constant pain, was too much. She died in Boston two days after he did, on March 6, 1888. ~styl ` , ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ ' !I ° !I !I ╧ !I α !I · !I !I ╝ !I ╩ !I ╬ 5¬ ╧ !I V !I b !I ⌠ !I !I ç !I £ !I » !I ╣ !I ≈ !I
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