The Portable Louisa May Alcott

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1832, the second of four daughters of Abigail May Alcott and Bronson Alcott, the prominent Transcendentalist thinker and social reformer. Raised in Concord, Massachusetts, and educated by her father, Alcott came under the influence of the great men of his circle: Emerson, Hawthorne, the preacher Theodore Parker, and Thoreau. From her youth, she worked at various tasks to help support her family: sewing, teaching, domestic service, and writing. In 1862, she volunteered to serve as a nurse in a Union army hospital—an experience that provided her with material for her first successful book, Hospital Sketches (1863). Between 1863 and 1869, she published many anonymous and pseudonymous Gothic romances and lurid thrillers. But it was the publication of Little Women (1868-69), a novel based on the girlhood adventures of the four Alcott sisters, that brought her immense popular acclaim and financial security. In the wake of Little Women’s popularity, she brought out An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Little Men (1871), Eight Cousins (1875), Rose in Bloom (1876), Jo’s Boys (1886), and other books for children, as well as three major works for adults: Work (1873), A Modern Mephistopheles (1877), and Moods (1882), a revised version of her 1864 novel. An active participant in the women’s suffrage and temperance movements during the last decade of her life, Alcott died in Boston in 1888.

ELIZABETH LENNOX KEYSER teaches English at Hollins University and edits the journal Children’s Literature. Her book Whispers in the Dark: The Fiction of Louisa May Alcott won the 1993 Children’s Literature Association Book Award. She is also the author of the Twayne Master-works volume Little Women: A Family Romance.

EACH VOLUME in The Viking Portable Library either presents a representative selection from the works of a single outstanding writer or offers a comprehensive anthology on a special subject. Designed for compactness and readability, these books fill a need not met by other compilations. All are edited by distinguished authorities, who have written introductory essays and included much other helpful material.