Novelist and poet, Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), is best known for her novel Little Women, and its sequels, Little Men and Jo’s Boys. Born in Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1832, Alcott and her three sisters spent their childhood in Concord and Boston, Massachusetts. Educated by transcendentalist parents, Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail May, her days included visits to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s library and explorations into nature with Henry David Thoreau.

Passionate about writing from an early age, Alcott’s rich imagination created stories often performed in theatricals by her siblings for their friends in the barn, now known as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wayside.” She was very much a tomboy, like her character, Jo March, in Little Women.

As her family struggled financially, Alcott worked to help support them with jobs such as seamstress, teacher, governess and household servant. While finding work where she was able in a society that provided few opportunities for women, she continued to write.

Her career as an author began with submissions to popular magazines of poetry and short stories. Her first book, Flower Fables, was published in 1854 at the age of twenty-two. In 1863, Hospital Sketches, a book based on her letters home while a nurse in Washington, DC during the American Civil War, was published in the abolitionist magazine Boston Commonwealth.

Little Women, written at Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts during 1868, began as a request from her publisher to write a book for girls. Based on Alcott’s life with her sisters as they came of age in New England during the Civil War, Jo March, the principal protagonist, was the first realistic American heroine, a contrast to the idealized stereotype found in contemporary children’s literature.

The book’s success secured her career as a writer, yet she was never comfortable with her fame. Often tourists knocked on her door unaware that it was Alcott herself dressed in a maid’s apron who sent them away.

A strong advocate for social reform, she campaigned tirelessly for women’s suffrage and attended the Women’s Congress of 1875 in Syracuse, New York. She wrote articles advocating for women’s rights for the Boston-based Woman’s Journal.

In 1879, when Massachusetts passed a law giving women the right to vote in town elections on issues involving education and children, Alcott was the first woman to register to vote in Concord. Frustrated by the lack of interest by many Concord women in voting rights, she canvassed the community to convince other women to join her.

Alcott and nineteen women cast their ballots at the Concord Town Meeting on March 29, 1880. “No bolt fell on our audacious heads, no earthquake shook the town,” she reported.

Her final novel, Jo’s Boys, published in 1886, contained arguments for women’s rights and other social reforms. She continued her tireless campaign to persuade women to register to vote until her death in 1888.

Louisa May Alcott published more than 200 literary works in many genres that have been translated into over 54 languages. However, it is the timeless story of the March sisters in Little Women that remains most closely associated with the author.