Little Women
- Written By Louisa May Alcott
Little Women
- Louisa May Alcott
$19.99
Little Women
In a modest home in New England, the four March sisters are growing up fast while their father serves as a Civil War chaplain far from home. As adulthood looms closer and closer, the sisters dream of how they hope their young lives unfold. Meg longs for pretty things and a household of her own; Jo scribbles stories in the attic, dreaming of a writer’s life; gentle Beth finds her happiness playing at the piano; and young Amy, the artist of the family, means to paint her mark on the world.
Under the steady guidance of their mother, the girls weather poverty, temptation, first love, and heartbreak as they cross the threshold into womanhood. Discover the roots of one of the most cherished heroines in American fiction.
Published in 1868, Little Women has never once gone out of print. Its warm portrayal of coming-of-age sisterhood has inspired readers and writers alike for generations, from Simone de Beauvoir to J. K. Rowling. Every year since its release, it has reached the hearts of fresh audiences through more than a century of adaptations for stage and screen. Now, one of the greatest pieces of American literature returns in a new reprint, ready to tell its enduring story once again.
About the Author
- Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott was born in 1832 in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and raised in Concord, Massachusetts, at the heart of New England’s Transcendentalist movement. Her father, the philosopher and reformer Amos Bronson Alcott, was a celebrated thinker but an unreliable provider, which led to a tense home life. Choosing writing as an outlet, Alcott began producing works at the early age of eight to her parents’ approval and praise.
The family also counted famed writers of the time such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau among its neighbors and friends. Despite this, poverty shaped Louisa’s childhood, and upon moving to Boston at 16, she worked a plethora of jobs, including teacher, seamstress, governess, and domestic servant to help keep the household afloat in the following years.
She began professional writing chiefly to earn money, turning out poems, thrillers, and sensational tales, some under the pen name A. M. Barnard. During the Civil War she served as a nurse in a Washington hospital, an experience that permanently damaged her health but produced her first popular book, Hospital Sketches (1863). Then, at a publisher’s suggestion, she drew on her own girlhood and her three sisters to write a story for young readers; this would go on to be her masterpiece.
Little Women debuted in 1868 and made her famous almost overnight, freeing her family from financial strife at last. Alcott wrote steadily for the rest of her life, championed abolition and women’s suffrage, and never married. She died in Boston in 1888 due to declining health from the mercury she ingested during the Civil War. She passed on two days after her father, at the age of fifty-five.
