Louisa May Alcott
Author · 1832–1888

Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott was an American novelist (1832–1888). Born in Germantown.

Our catalogue lists 15 books by Louisa May Alcott, mostly classic romance, folklore and fairy tales and historical fiction. They span 1848 to 1995. The most-read is Little Women (1848). 8 titles are free to read on Project Gutenberg, and 10 have free LibriVox audiobooks.

Books by Louisa May Alcott

Biography

Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania on November 29, 1832. She and her three sisters, Anna, Elizabeth, and May, were educated by their father, philosopher and teacher Bronson Alcott, and raised on the practical Christianity of their mother, Abigail May. Louisa spent her childhood in Boston and in Concord, Massachusetts, where her days were enlightened by visits to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s library, excursions into nature with Henry David Thoreau, and theatricals in the barn at "Hillside". Like her character, "Jo March" in Little Women, young Louisa was a tomboy. "No boy could be my friend till I had beaten him in a race," she claimed, "and no girl if she refused to climb trees, leap fences ..." For Louisa, writing was an early passion. She had a rich imagination and often her stories became melodramas that she and her sisters would act out for friends. Louisa preferred to play the "lurid" parts in these plays --"the villains, ghosts, bandits, and disdainful queens." At age 15, troubled by the poverty that plagued her family, she vowed: "I will do something by and by. Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write -- anything to help the family; and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t!"

Authors like Louisa May Alcott