Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet best known for writing the novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels Good Wives (1869), Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886). Raised in New England by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott, she grew up among many well-known intellectuals of the day, including Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau.

Alcott's family suffered from financial difficulties, and while she worked to help support the family from an early age, she also sought an outlet in writing. She began to achieve critical success for her writing in the 1860s. Early in her career, she sometimes used pen names such as A. M. Barnard, under which she wrote lurid short stories and sensation novels for adults.

Published in 1868, Little Women is set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House of Concord, Massachusetts, and is loosely based on Alcott's childhood experiences with her three sisters, Abigail May Alcott Nieriker, Elizabeth Sewall Alcott, and Anna Alcott Pratt. The novel was well-received at the time and is still popular today among both children and adults. It has been adapted for film and television many times.

Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist and remained unmarried throughout her life. She also spent her life active in reform movements such as temperance and women's suffrage. She died from a stroke in Boston on March 6, 1888, just two days after her father's death.

Birth and early childhood
Louisa May Alcott was born on November 29, 1832, in Germantown, now part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her parents were transcendentalist and educator Amos Bronson Alcott and social worker Abigail "Abba" May. She was the second of four daughters, with Anna as the oldest and Elizabeth and May as the youngest. Louisa May Alcott was named after Abba's sister, Louisa May Greele, who had died four years previously. After Alcott's birth, Bronson kept a record of her development, noting her strong will, which she inherited from her mother's May side of the family. He described her as "fit for the scuffle of things".

Alcott kept a journal at as early as six-years-old. Bronson and Abba often read it and left short messages for her on her pillow, encouraging her to be well-behaved. Alcott often felt like she was not a well-behaved child. Alcott was a tomboy who preferred boys' games and preferred to be friends with boys or other tomboys. She wanted to play football with the boys at school but was not allowed to.

The family moved to Boston in 1834, where Alcott's father established the experimental Temple School and met with other transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Bronson participated in child-care but often failed to provide income, creating conflict in the family. At home and in school he taught morals and improvement, while Abba emphasized imagination and supported Alcott's writing at home. Bronson occasionally brought Alcott and her older sister Anna to the school and used them as examples in his moral lessons. Alcott was often tended by her father's friend Elizabeth Peabody, but once she was three years-old she frequently visited Temple School during the day.

Hosmer Cottage
In 1840, after several setbacks with Temple School and a brief stay in Scituate, Massachusetts, the Alcotts moved to Hosmer Cottage in Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson, who had convinced Bronson to move his family to Concord, paid the Alcotts' rent. The family was often in need of financial help. While living there, Alcott and her sisters befriended the Hosmer, Goodwin, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Channing children, who lived nearby. The Hosmer and Alcott children put on plays and often included other children. Alcott also attended school with other children. At eight years-old, Alcott wrote her first poem, "To the First Robin", after feeding a hungry robin in the garden. When she showed the poem to her mother, Abba was pleased. In October 1842 Bronson brought Charles Lane and Henry Wright from his five-month-long tour in England. They were to live with the Alcotts at Hosmer Cottage while Bronson and Lane made plans to establish a "New Eden". The children's education was undertaken by Lane, who implemented a strict schedule. Young Alcott disliked Lane, who tried to exact obedience from her, and found the new living arrangements difficult.

Fruitlands
In 1843 the Alcotts moved to Fruitlands in Harvard, Massachusetts, which was a utopian community started by Alcott's father and Charles Lane. She later described these early years in a newspaper sketch entitled "Transcendental Wild Oats." The sketch was reprinted in the volume Silver Pitchers (1876), which relates the family's experiment in "plain living and high thinking" at Fruitlands. Alcott disliked the schooling she received in the community. The children were given notebooks to write creatively, and Alcott found happiness in writing poetry about her family, elves, and spirits. She also enjoyed playing with Charles Lane's son William and often put on fairy tale plays or performances of Dickens's stories. She read works by Dickens, Plutarch, Byron, Edgeworth, and Goldsmith. During the demise of Fruitlands, the Alcotts discussed whether or not the family should separate. Alcott recorded this in her journal and expressed her unhappiness should they separate. During Bronson's nervous breakdown following the collapse of Fruitlands, Alcott decided to support her mother financially and emotionally.

Hillside
After the collapse of Fruitlands in early 1844, the family rented rooms in Still River, where Alcott attended public school and wrote and directed plays that her sisters and friends performed. In April 1845 the family used Abba's inheritance to buy a home in Concord they called Hillside. Here, Alcott and her sister Anna attended a school run by John Hosmer after a period of home education. The family lived close to the Emersons, and Alcott was granted open access to the Emerson library, where she read Carlyle, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe. In the summer of 1848 Alcott opened a school of twenty students in a barn near Hillside. Her students consisted of the Emerson, Channing, and Alcott children. Alcott and Anna continued acting in plays written by Alcott herself. While Anna preferred portraying calm characters, Alcott preferred the roles of villains, knights, and sorcerers. These plays later inspired Alcott's Comic Tragedies (1893). The family struggled without income beyond the girls' sewing and teaching. Eventually, some friends arranged a job for Abba and three years after moving into Hillside, the family moved to Boston. Hillside was sold to Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1852. Louisa described the three years she spent at Concord as a child as the "happiest of her life."

Education
Alcott was primarily educated by her father, who established a strict schedule and believed in "the sweetness of self-denial." She was also instructed by naturalist Henry David Thoreau, as well as Sophia Foord, who lived with the family for a time, and whom she would later eulogize. She also grew up around writers and educators such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, and Julia Ward Howe, all of whom were family friends. Alcott had a particular fondness for Thoreau and Emerson; as a young girl, they were both "sources of romantic fantasies for her."

Teenage years
When the Alcott family moved to South End, Boston in 1848, poverty made it necessary for Alcott to go to work at an early age as a teacher, seamstress, governess, domestic helper, and laundress. Together, Alcott and her sister taught a school, though Alcott disliked teaching. Her sisters also supported the family by working as seamstresses, while their mother took on social work among the Irish immigrants. Only the youngest, May, was able to attend public school. Due to all of these pressures, writing became a creative and emotional outlet for Alcott. In 1849 she created a family newspaper, the Olive Leaf, named after the local Olive Branch. Alcott's newspaper included stories, poems, articles, and housekeeping advice. It was later renamed to The Portfolio. She also wrote her first novel, The Inheritance, which was published posthumously and based on Jane Eyre. Alcott, who was driven in life not to be poor, wrote, "I wish I was rich, I was good, and we were all a happy family this day."

Life in Dedham
Abba ran an "intelligence office" to help the destitute find employment. When James Richardson came to Abba in the winter of 1851 seeking a companion for his frail sister who could also help out with some light housekeeping, Alcott volunteered to serve in the house filled with books, music, artwork, and good company on Highland Avenue. Alcott may have imagined the experience as something akin to being a heroine in a Gothic novel, as Richardson described their home in a letter as stately but decrepit.

Richardson's sister, Elizabeth, was 40 years old and suffered from neuralgia. She was shy and did not seem to have much use for Alcott. Instead, Richardson spent hours reading her poetry and treating her like his confidant and companion, sharing his personal thoughts and feelings with her. Alcott reminded Richardson that she was supposed to be Elizabeth's companion, not his, and she was tired of listening to his "philosophical, metaphysical, and sentimental rubbish." He responded by assigning her more laborious duties, including chopping wood, scrubbing the floors, shoveling snow, drawing water from the well, washing dishes, and blacking Richardson's boots.

Alcott quit after seven weeks, when neither of the two girls her mother sent to replace her decided to take the job. As she walked from Richardson's home to Dedham station, she opened the envelope he handed her with her pay. One account states that she was so unsatisfied with the four dollars she found inside that she mailed the money back to him in contempt. Another account states that Bronson may have returned the money himself and rebuked Richardson. She later wrote a slightly fictionalized account of her time in Dedham titled How I went into service, which she submitted to Boston publisher James T. Fields. He rejected the piece, telling Alcott that she had no future as a writer.

Early publications
In September 1851 Alcott's poem "Sunlight" appeared in Peterson's Magazine under the name Flora Fairchild, making it Alcott's first successful publication. 1852 marked the publication of her first story, "The Rival Painters: A Tale of Rome", published in the Olive Branch. In 1854 she attended The Boston Theatre, where she was given a pass to attend free of charge. She published her first book, Flower Fables, in 1854; the book was a selection of tales she originally told to Ellen Emerson, daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Lidian Emerson had read the stories and encouraged Alcott to publish them. Alcott hoped to eventually shift her writing "from fairies and fables to men and realities". Alcott also wrote The Rival Prima Donnas, a play adaptation of her story with the same title.

In 1855 the Alcotts moved to Walpole, New Hampshire, where Alcott and Anna participated in the Walpole Amateur Dramatic Company. Alcott was praised for her "superior histrionic ability". At the end of the theater season, Alcott, encouraged by the success of Flower Fables, began writing Christmas Elves, a collection of Christmas stories illustrated by May Alcott. In November Alcott traveled to Boston and attempted to publish the collection while living with a relative. November was too late in the year to publish Christmas books and Alcott was unable to publish The Christmas Elves. She then wrote and published "The Sisters' Trial", a story about four women who were based on the Alcott sisters.

Family changes
Alcott returned to Walpole in mid-1856 to find her sister Elizabeth ill with scarlet fever. Louisa helped nurse Elizabeth, and when she was not nursing helped with the housekeeping and wrote. Alcott prepared to publish Beach Bubbles that year, but the book was rejected. By the end of the year she was writing for the Olive Branch, the Ladies Enterprise, The Saturday Evening Gazette, and the Sunday News. Alcott again lived in Boston for a time, where she met Julia Ward Howe and Frank Sanborn. In the summer of 1857 Alcott and Anna rejoined the Walpole Amateur Dramatic Company and sought to entertain Elizabeth with stories about their acting. The family later visited Swampscott in an effort to boost Elizabeth's health, which was poor from effects of the scarlet fever, but it did not improve. During this time Alcott read The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell and found inspiration from Brontë's life.

The family moved back to Concord in September 1857, where the Alcotts rented while Bronson repaired Orchard House. During that time, the two oldest Alcott sisters organized the Concord Dramatic Union. Elizabeth died in March 1858, and three weeks after her death Anna became engaged to John Pratt, a man she met in the Concord Dramatic Union. Alcott experienced depression about these events and considered Elizabeth's death and Anna's engagement catalysts to breaking up their sisterhood. When the family moved into Orchard House in July 1858, Alcott again returned to Boston to find employment. Unable to find work and filled with despair, Alcott contemplated suicide by drowning, but she decided to "take Fate by the throat and shake a living out of her." Alcott eventually received an offer to work as a governess for invalid Alice Lovering, which she accepted.

Hospital Sketches
As an adult, Alcott was an abolitionist, temperance advocate, and feminist. In 1859, Alcott began writing for the Atlantic Monthly. When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, Alcott wanted to enlist in the Union army but could not because she was a woman. Instead, she sewed uniforms and waited until she reached the minimum age for army nurses at thirty years old. Soon after turning thirty in 1862, Alcott applied to the U. S. Sanitary Commission, run by Dorothea Dix, and on December 11 was assigned to work in the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown, Washington, D. C. When she left, Bronson felt as if he was "sending [his] only son to the war". When Alcott arrived she discovered that conditions in the hospital were poor, with over-crowded and filthy quarters, bad food, unstable beds, and insufficient ventilation. Alcott's duties included cleaning wounds, feeding the men, assisting with amputations, and later assigning the men to their wards. She also entertained the wounded men by reading aloud and putting on skits. She served as a nurse for six weeks in 1862–1863. She intended to serve three months, but contracted typhoid fever and became critically ill partway through her service. In late January Bronson traveled to the hospital and took Alcott to Concord to recover.

The letters Alcott wrote while serving as a nurse were revised and published in the Boston anti-slavery paper Commonwealth and collected as Hospital Sketches (1863, republished with additions in 1869). She wrote about the mismanagement of hospitals, the indifference and callousness of some of the surgeons she encountered, and her passion for seeing the war firsthand. Her main character, Tribulation Periwinkle, shows a passage from innocence to maturity and is a "serious and eloquent witness". The stories brought her first critical recognition for her observations and humor, and their popularity surprised Alcott. With the popularity of Hospital Sketches, Alcott began publishing versions of some of her letters from a trip she took the year before, but she was unsatisfied with them and canceled publication.

Moods
Soon after the success of Hospital Sketches, Alcott published her novel Moods (1864), based on her own experience with and stance on "woman's right to selfhood." Alcott struggled to find a publisher because the novel was long. After abridgments, Moods was published and popular, but not as much as Alcott had hoped for. The plot follows a young woman named Sylvia Yule who, through a misunderstanding, marries the friend of the man she loves. When she realizes she cannot offer love to both men, she leaves to live with her father and eventually dies as punishment for her hasty actions. In 1882 Alcott changed the end, having Sylvia reconcile herself to her marriage and return to her husband. While Alcott was touring Europe in 1870, she was displeased to find out that her publisher released a new edition without her approval.

Little Women and Good Wives
Alcott began editing the children's magazine Merry's Museum to help pay off family debts incurred while Alcott toured Europe as the companion of wealthy invalid Anna Weld in 1865-66. Though Alcott disliked editing the magazine, she became the main editor in 1867. Around the same time, Alcott's publisher, Thomas Niles, asked her to write a book especially for girls. Alcott was hesitant to write it because she felt she knew more about boys than she did about girls. Alcott set to work on her semi-autobiographical novel Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (1868), completing it in two months after writing for several hours a day. In Little Women, Alcott based the heroine Jo on herself. Alcott developed a close relationship with the young Polish revolutionary Ladislas "Laddie" Wisniewski during her European tour with Weld. She detailed a romance between herself and Wisniewski but later took it out. Alcott identified Wisniewski as one of the models for the character Laurie in Little Women. The other characters have parallels with people from Alcott's lifefrom Beth's death mirroring Elizabeth's to Jo's rivalry with Amy mirroring Alcott's own rivalry with her sister May.

Niles predicted Little Women might not sell well because he found it uninteresting. However, it was well-received, with critics and audiences finding it to be a fresh, natural representation of daily life suitable for many age groups. An Eclectic Magazine reviewer called it "the very best of books to reach the hearts of the young of any age from six to sixty". With the success of Little Women, Alcott shied away from public attention and would sometimes act as a servant when fans came to her house. Niles asked Alcott to write a second part. Also known as Good Wives (1869), it follows the March sisters into adulthood and marriage. The book enjoyed equal popularity with Little Women.

Little Men and Jo's Boys
In 1870 Alcott joined May and a friend on a European tour. Alcott wrote little while in Europe, instead preferring to rest, and rumors began to spread that she had died from diphtheria. Later, Alcott began writing Little Men while in Europe after finding out that her brother-in-law, John Pratt, had died. Alcott was driven to write the book to provide financial support for Anna and her two sons, though Pratt left them money when he died. After she left Europe, the book was released the day she arrived in Boston. Little Men details life at the Plumfield School that Jo and Professor Bhaer have opened, which is an idealized version of Fruitlands. Jo and Professor Bhaer offer discipline and kindness to the boys and girls at Plumfield. While the character Daisy is based on Anna, Dan and Nan have parallels with Alcott.

Alcott took seven years to complete Jo's Boys (1886), her sequel to Little Men. She began the book in 1879 but discontinued it after her sister May's death in December. Alcott resumed work on the novel in 1882 after Mary Mapes Dodge of St. Nicholas asked for a new serial. In the book, the children from Little Men are grown up and building their lives, while Jo reflects on her life choices. Alcott apologized in the preface for what she felt was low-quality writing, the result of multiple interruptions in its composition; some reviewers considered the plot "haphazard". Jo's Boys (1886) completed the "March Family Saga", Alcott's best-known books.

Sensation stories
Between 1863 and 1872, Alcott anonymously wrote at least thirty-three gothic thrillers for popular magazines and papers such as The Flag of Our Union; they were rediscovered in 1975. In the mid-1860s she wrote passionate, fiery novels and sensation stories akin to those of English authors Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon under the nom de plume  A. M. Barnard. Other pen names she used include Aunt Weedy, Flora Fairfield, Oranthy Bluggage, and Minerva Moody. Among these sensation stories are A Long Fatal Love Chase and Pauline's Passion and Punishment. Catherine Ross Nickerson credits Alcott with creating one of the earliest works of detective fiction in American literature, preceded only by Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and his other Auguste Dupin stories, with the 1865 thriller "V.V., or Plots and Counterplots." Alcott published the story anonymously and it concerns a Scottish aristocrat who tries to prove that a mysterious woman has killed his fiancée and cousin. The detective on the case, Antoine Dupres, is a parody of Poe's Dupin who is less concerned with solving the crime than in setting up a way to reveal the solution with a dramatic flourish.

Work: A Story of Experience
Alcott's novel Work: A Story of Experience (1873) is semi-autobiographical and Alcott's last adult novel. The novel's young heroine, Christie Devon, strikes out on her own and takes various jobs to support herself. She befriends a destitute woman, and they comfort each other in times of despair. Christie falls in love with a man who is based on Thoreau. Shortly after they marry, he dies in the American Civil War, and Christie is left to be a single mother. Though Work received positive contemporary reviews, Alcott felt unsatisfied with the finished product because she felt that interruptions during the writing process weakened its quality.

Lulu Nieriker
Alcott nursed Abba, who was dying, in 1877 while writing Under the Lilacs (1878). Alcott also became ill and close to dying, so the two women moved in with Anna, who had recently purchased Thoreau's house with Alcott's financial support. After Abba's death in November, Alcott and Bronson permanently moved into Anna's house. Having had a strained relationship with her father in the past, Alcott found solace through their shared grief. Alcott's sister May was living in London at the time and married Ernest Nieriker a few months later. May became pregnant and was due to deliver her child near the end of 1879. Though Alcott wanted to travel to Paris to see May in time for the delivery, she decided against it because her health was poor. On December 29 May died from complications developed after childbirth, and in September 1880 Alcott assumed the care of her niece, Lulu, who was named after her. During the grief that followed May's death, Alcott and her father Bronson coped by writing poetry. In a letter to her friend Maria S. Porter, Alcott wrote, "Of all the griefs in my life, and I have had many, this is the bitterest." It was at this time that she completed Jack and Jill: A Village Story (1880).

Alcott sometimes hired a nanny when her poor health made it difficult to care for Lulu. While raising Lulu, Alcott published few works. When Bronson suffered a stroke in 1882, Alcott became his caretaker. Overwhelmed with taking care of her father and niece, she alternated between living in Concord and living in Boston. In June 1884 Alcott sold Orchard House, which the family was no longer living in.

Decline and death
Alcott suffered from chronic health problems in her later years, including vertigo, dyspepsia, headaches, fatigue, and pain in the limbs, diagnosed as neuralgia in her lifetime. When conventional medicines did not alleviate her pain, she tried mind-cure treatments, homeopathy, hypnotism, and Christian Science. Her ill health has been attributed to mercury poisoning, morphine intake, intestinal cancer, or meningitis. Alcott herself cited mercury poisoning as the cause of her sickness. When she contracted typhoid fever during her American Civil War service, she was treated with calomel, which is a compound containing mercury. Dr. Norbert Hirschhorn and Dr. Ian Greaves suggest that Alcott's chronic health problems may have been associated with an autoimmune disease such as systemic lupus erythematosus, possibly because mercury exposure compromised her immune system. An 1870 portrait of Alcott shows her cheeks to be flushed, perhaps with the butterfly rash that is often characteristic of lupus. The suggested diagnosis, based on Alcott's journal entries, cannot be proved.

As Alcott's health declined, she often lived at Dunreath Place, a convalescent home run by Dr. Rhoda Lawrence for which Alcott had provided financial support in the past. Eventually a doctor advised Alcott to stop writing in order to preserve her health. In 1887 Alcott legally adopted Anna's son, John Pratt, as her heir, then created a will that left her money to her remaining family. Alcott visited Bronson at his deathbed on March 1, 1888, and expressed the wish that she could join him in death. On March 3, the day before her father died, she suffered a stroke and went unconscious, in which state she remained until her death on March 6, 1888. She was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, near Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau, on a hillside now known as Authors' Ridge. Her niece Lulu was eight years old when Alcott died and was cared for by Anna Alcott Pratt before reuniting with her father in Europe.

Abolition
When Alcott was young, her family served as station masters on the Underground Railroad, when they housed fugitive slaves. Alcott herself was unable to dictate when she first became an abolitionist, suggesting that she became an abolitionist either when William Lloyd Garrison was attacked or when a young African-American boy saved her from drowning in Frog Pond. Both events occurred when Alcott was a child. Alcott formed her abolitionist ideas, in part, from listening to conversations between her father and uncle Sam May or between her father and Emerson. She was also inspired by the abolitionism of Rev. Theodore Parker, Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, and William Lloyd Garrison, with whom she was acquainted while living in Boston as an adult. Alcott also knew Frederick Douglass in adulthood. As a young woman Alcott joined her family in teaching African-Americans how to read and write. When John Brown was executed on December 2, 1859, for his involvement in anti-slavery, Alcott described it as "the execution of Saint John the Just". Alcott attended several abolitionist rallies, including a rally at Tremont Temple that advocated for Thomas Simm's freedom. Alcott also believed in the full integration of African-Americans into society.

Women's rights
After Abba's death, Alcott committed to following her mother's example by actively advocating for women's suffrage. In 1877, Alcott helped found the Women's Educational and Industrial Union in Boston. Alcott read and admired the Declaration of Sentiments published by the Seneca Falls Convention on women's rights, advocated for women's suffrage, and became the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Massachusetts in a school board election on March 9, 1879. She encouraged other Concord women to vote and was disappointed when few did. Alcott attended the Woman's Congress in 1875 and became a member of the National Congress of the Women of the United States, later recounting it in "My Girls". She gave speeches advocating women's rights and eventually convinced her publisher Thomas Niles to publish suffragist writings. Along with Elizabeth Stoddard, Rebecca Harding Davis, Anne Moncure Crane, and others, Alcott was part of a group of female authors during the Gilded Age who addressed women's issues in a modern and candid manner. Their works were, as one newspaper columnist of the period commented, "among the decided 'signs of the times'". She also joined Sorosis, where members discussed health and dress reform for women, and she helped found Concord's first Temperance Society. Between 1874 and 1887 many of Alcott's works, published in the Woman's Journal, discussed women's suffrage. Her essay "Happy Women" argued that women did not need to marry. She explained her spinsterhood in an interview with Louise Chandler Moulton, saying "I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man's soul put by some freak of nature into a woman's body.... because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.” She advocated for dress and diet reform as well as for women to receive college education. She often signed her letters with "Yours for reform of all kinds". After her death, Alcott was memorialized during a suffragist meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Biography and documentary
Before her death, Alcott asked her sister Anna Pratt to destroy her letters and journals; Anna did not destroy all of them and gave the rest to family friend Ednah Dow Cheney. In 1889 Cheney was the first person to undergo a deep study of Alcott's life, compiling the journals and letters to publish Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals. The compilation has been published multiple times since then. Cheney also published Louisa May Alcott: The Children's Friend, a version of the first compilation revised to focus on Alcott's appeal to children. Other various compilations of Alcott's letters were published in the following decades. In 1909 Belle Moses wrote Louisa May Alcott, Dreamer and Worker: A Study of Achievement, which established itself as the "first major biography" about Alcott. Katharine S. Anthony's Louisa May Alcott, written in 1938, was the first biography to focus on the author's psychology. A comprehensive biography about Alcott was not written until Madeleine B. Stern's 1950 biography Louisa May Alcott. In the 1960s-1970s, feminist analysis of Alcott's fiction increased; analysis also focused on the contrast between her domestic and sensation fiction.

"Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind 'Little Women'" aired in 2009 as part of the American Masters biography series and was aired a second time on May 20, 2018. It was directed by Nancy Porter and written by Harriet Reisen, who wrote the script based on primary sources from Alcott's life. The documentary, which starred Elizabeth Marvel as Alcott, was shot onsite for the events it covered. It included interviews with Alcott scholars, including Sarah Elbert, Daniel Shealy, Madeleine Stern, Leona Rostenberg, and Geraldine Brooks.

Alcott homes
The Alcotts' Concord home, Orchard House, where the family lived for 25 years and where Little Women was written, is open to the public and pays homage to the Alcotts by focusing on public education and historic preservation. The Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association allows tourists to walk through the house and learn about Alcott. Her Boston home is featured on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail.

Film and television
Little Women inspired film versions in 1933, 1949, 1994, 2018, and 2019. The novel also inspired television series in 1958, 1970, 1978, and 2017, anime versions in 1981 and 1987, and a 2005 musical. It also inspired a BBC Radio 4 version in 2017. Little Men inspired film versions in 1934, 1940, and 1998, and was the basis for a 1998 television series. Other films based on Alcott novels and stories are An Old-Fashioned Girl (1949), The Inheritance (1997), and An Old Fashioned Thanksgiving (2008).

Influence
Various modern writers have been influenced and inspired by Alcott's work, particularly Little Women. As a child, Simone de Beauvior felt a connection to Jo and expressed, "Reading this novel gave me an exalted sense of myself. Cynthia Ozick calls herself a "Jo-of-the-future", and Patti Smith explains, "[I]t was Louisa May Alcott who provided me with a positive view of my female destiny." Writers influenced by Alcott include Ursula K. Le Guin, Barbara Kingsolver, Gail Mazur, Anna Quindlen, Anne Lamott, Sonia Sanchez, Ann Petry, Gertrude Stein, and J. K. Rowling. U. S. president Theodore Roosevelt said he "worshiped" Alcott's books. Other politicians who have been impacted by Alcott's books include Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Hillary Clinton, and Sandra Day O'Connor. Louisa May Alcott was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996.

The Little Women series

 * Little Women, or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (1868)
 * Second Part of Little Women, or Good Wives, published in 1869 and afterward published together with Little Women.
 * Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo's Boys (1871)
 * Jo's Boys and How They Turned Out: A Sequel to "Little Men" (1886)

Novels

 * The Inheritance (1849, unpublished until 1997)
 * Moods (1865, revised 1882)
 * An Old Fashioned Girl (1870)
 * Will's Wonder Book (1870)
 * Work: A Story of Experience (1873)
 * Beginning Again, Being a Continuation of Work (1875)
 * Eight Cousins, or The Aunt Hill (1875)
 * Rose in Bloom: A Sequel to Eight Cousins (1876)
 * Under the Lilacs (1878)
 * Jack and Jill: A Village Story (1880)
 * Diana and Persis (1978, posthumous; incomplete manuscript)

As A. M. Barnard

 * Behind a Mask, or a Woman's Power (1866)
 * The Abbot's Ghost, or Maurice Treherne's Temptation (1867)
 * A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866; first published 1995)
 * "V.V., or Plots and Counterplots"

Published anonymously

 * A Modern Mephistopheles (1877)

Short story collections

 * Flower Fables (1854)
 * On Picket Duty, and other tales (1864)
 * Morning-Glories and Other Stories (1867) Eight fantasy stories and four poems for children, including "A Strange Island", "The Rose Family", "A Christmas Song", "Morning-Glories", "Shadow-Children", "Poppy's Pranks", "What the Swallows Did", "Little Gulliver", "The Whale's Story", "Goldfin and Silvertail".
 * Kitty's Class Day and Other Stories (Three Proverb Stories), 1868, (includes "Kitty's Class Day", "Aunt Kipp" and "Psyche's Art")


 * Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag (1872–1882). (66 short stories in six volumes)
 * 1. "Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag"
 * 2. "Shawl-Straps"
 * 3. "Cupid and Chow-Chow"
 * 4. "My Girls, Etc."
 * 5. "Jimmy's Cruise in the Pinafore, Etc."
 * 6. "An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc."


 * Proverb Stories (1882)


 * Spinning-Wheel Stories (1884). A collection of 12 short stories.


 * Lulu's Library (1886–1889) A collection of 32 short stories in three volumes.
 * A Garland for Girls (1887). A collection of seven short stories, including "May Flowers", "An Ivy Spray and Ladies' Slippers", "Pansies", "Water-Lilies", "Poppies and Wheat", "Little Button-Rose", and "Mountain-Laurel and Maidenhair".
 * Morning-Glories and Queen Aster (1904) Two short stories.
 * The Brownie and the Princess (2004). A collection of ten short stories.

Other short stories and novelettes

 * "The Rival Painters: A Tale of Rome" (1852)


 * Hospital Sketches (1863)
 * Pauline's Passion and Punishment (1863)
 * My Contraband, first published as The Brothers (1863)
 * “Enigmas” (1864)
 * The Mysterious Key and What It Opened (1867)
 * "The Skeleton in the Closet" (1867)
 * "Doctor Dorn's Revenge" (1868)
 * La Jeune; or, Actress and Woman (1868)
 * Countess Varazoff (1868)
 * The Romance of a Bouquet (1868)
 * A Laugh and A Look (1868)
 * "Fatal Follies" (1868)
 * "My Mysterious Mademoiselle" (1869)
 * "Lost in a Pyramid, or the Mummy's Curse"
 * Transcendental Wild Oats (1873)
 * Silver Pitchers, and Independence: A Centennial Love Story (1876)
 * "Perilous Play" (1876)
 * A Whisper in the Dark (1877)
 * "The Candy Country" (1885)
 * Comic Tragedies (1893, posthumous)
 * “Taming a Tartar”
 * “Fate in a Fan”
 * “Which Wins?”
 * “Honor’s Fortune”
 * A Pair of Eyes, or Modern Magic
 * The Fate of the Forrests
 * A Double Tragedy: An Actor’s Story
 * Ariel, A Legend of the Lighthouse
 * A Nurse’s Story

Poems

 * "Sunlight" (1851)


 * “My Kingdom” (written 1845, published 1875)
 * “The Children’s Song” (written 1860, published 1889)
 * “Young America” (1861)
 * "With A Rose That Bloomed on the Day of John Brown’s Martyrdom" (1862)
 * "Thoreau's Flute" (1863)
 * "In the Garret" (1865)
 * "The Sanitary Fair" (1865)
 * “Come, Butter, Come” (1867)
 * “What Shall the Little Children Bring” (1884)
 * “Oh, the Beautiful Old Story” (1886)
 * “The Fairy Spring” (1887)

Books