Chavez 1
Marissa Chavez
American Literature
Ms. Moreno P.3
5 February 2016
Louisa May Alcott Research Paper
Louisa May Alcott is mainly a writer for adult fiction, but she has also impacted the genre of youth fiction. Alcott is best known for her book “Little Women” which is a series of books that tells the life and values of the middle class in the 19th century. She was also a reformer and advocate for women’s suffrage.
Louisa May Alcott was born on November 29, 1832 in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Alcott was taught by her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, until 1848, and studied informally with family friends such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker (Biography). The Alcotts were very poor, but as she went from home to home she gained new values and skills and recorded her journeys in a journal. Alcott lived in Boston, Massachusetts and worked as a house servant and teacher to provide for her family. During the Civil War, she went to Washington, D.C. to work as a nurse (Biography). Louisa had to stop serving as a nurse because she became ill.
When Louisa published her first novel Moods, she was offered a job as the editor of magazine for the youth called Merry’s Museum. A year later she came out with the first volume of Little Women, which was basically about her childhood. Jo, the character,
…show more content…
She wrote An Old-fashioned Girl (1870), Little Men (1871), and Work (1873), an account of her early efforts to help support the family (Encyclopedia of World Biography) . As she became more and more popular she began to speak up about the dangers of drinking alcohol, and also campaigned for women's suffrage. She was then inspired to write a book about her father's attempts to start a group where people live together and share ownership and use of property in Massachusetts. Alcott came out with a book almost every year since then and has gained many fans of her