| The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Fifth Edition
Louisa May Alcott Louisa May Alcott is best known for her
children's novel Little Women (1868), but there are almost three
hundred works in the Alcott canon. In much of this writing
Alcott, who never married, ostensibly proposes that women's true
work is found in marriage and family, yet her journals and
letters illustrate the dichotomy between her own life and her
fictional world. Compared with the lives of many of her heroines
and contemporaries, Alcott's life was atypical. Louisa was born
in 1832 to Abigail May (Abba) and Amos Bronson Alcott. Her
parents were closely tied to many important philosophical and
social issues of the day—Transcendentalism, abolition, women's
suffrage, and educational reform. Close family friends,
including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, and
William Garrison, composed a virtual Who's Who of the time.
Although the Alcott girls were exposed to great ideas and
surrounded by books, the family was impoverished