4. Louisa May Alcott, Author

Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pa., November 29, 1832. Her father was a cultured school-teacher and her mother of an old aristocratic family. Louisa was the eldest of four daughters, whose happy life she pictures in “Little Women,” herself being “Jo.” She was a wild, happy-hearted, enthusiastic girl, preferring whistling and romping and boys’ games rather than girls’. Their home was frequently visited by such literary people as Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, who were her father’s friends. At eight years of age she wrote this poem of eight lines:

Her mother preserved this poem, and told her if she kept on she might one day be a second Shakespeare. She was fond of telling fairy stories to amuse her sisters and friends, and often turned the old tales into little plays which the children acted in a barn. One of these plays was “Jack and the Bean Stalk.” A squash vine, placed in the barn, was the bean-stalk, and when it was cut down the boy who played Giant, would come tumbling down from the hay-loft. At thirteen she wrote the beautiful poem, “My Kingdom.” After she became a school-teacher she was always helping somebody, taking care of an invalid or the poor, or sewing to help her mother. She continued to write stories. Some of the stories were rejected and the publisher advised her to stick to her school-teaching. Returning from the Civil War, where she had been a valued nurse to the wounded soldiers, she presented, through her father, several short stories to a publisher, who rejected them, with the advice that she write a story for girls. She thought she could not do that, and wrote “Little Women” to prove that she could not, but it is perhaps the best-loved girls’ story ever written. Then she wrote “Little Men,” of which fifty thousand copies were ordered before it was printed. She received one hundred thousand dollars for her books. Her life-desire was now realized in having money enough to make her family comfortable. Her father died in 1888, and she followed him only three days after. Miss Louisa May Alcott, besides being a writer, was also an earnest advocate of woman suffrage and temperance.