Louisa May Alcott Research Paper

The main home of the Alcotts was known as Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts. It was here that Louisa May grew up among other greats such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and even studied botany under Henry David Thoreau. “Yet she was brought up with the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne as neighbors, teachers, role models, and close family friends” (yale). They were perhaps the ones who helped her learn to write from her heart instead of what the public wanted to hear.

Alcott took many different jobs from a very young age. She became a teacher, tutor, and even travelled Europe as a companion. Her reasons for taking many jobs included her large family and poor parents. Her father gave

She wrote stories of terror and fights and jilted lovers seeking revenge because she longed for more excitement in her life. She became an author because she enjoyed the work and her family needed the money, just as her inspiration had done.

To vent anger and to have fun, she wrote potboilers, which were stories that interested the public at the time. These books involved dramatic plots, spurned lovers, blood, gore, and some type of a chase, which can be witnessed in her book, “A Long Futile Love Chase”. “Louisa May Alcott… wrote a series of thrillers or sensationalist stories before her success with the domestic novel, or the novel of sentiment, Little Women, in 1868” (womenwriters). She wrote on topics such as these not only to please her readers, but to let out some of her anger in life.

Later in her career, her publisher convinced her to write a book for younger girls. From this came the classic and perhaps most well-known of her works, “Little Women”. The novel came in two parts, both covering the lives of herself and her sisters in a semi-autobiographical tale. Their names were changed, but their personalities, situations in life, and everyday problems of the central family, the Marches, were inspired by the events of the Alcott

In Little Women, her writing style is descriptive in a way the gives the reader a general idea but permits them to add a bit of description that is of their own creation. “One smooth path led into the meadow and here the little fold congregated; one swept across the pond, where skaters were darting about like water bugs; and the third, from the very top of the steep hill, ended abruptly at a rail fence on the high bank above the road” (Alcott Jack and Jill 1). In this story, Alcott begins by painting the scenery in a way that leaves plenty of room for imagination.

In this classic novel, even those who have not read the book can see by the title and the way others talk about it that the writing is calm and warm to those who do choose to read it. “Alcott is best known for her sentimental yet realistic depictions of nineteenth-century domestic life” (empirezine). Alcott was known for her beautiful writing style, and her career flourished once Little Women had been written, published, and read. Those who read the book could not get