In nineteenth-century New England, in the shadow of the Civil War, the four teenaged March sisters will come of age sharing joys and hardships, dreams and disappointments. In the throes of unfamiliar poverty and adult responsibility the girls, with their wildly different personalities, find it's not an easy time to make the transition from girlhood to womanhood. But nurtured by their wise and beloved Marmee, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy are bound by their love for one another and the feminine strength they share. Responding to the need for a 'girls' book,' Louisa May Alcott was met with unexpected fame and fortune for this novel inspired by her own family. Readers of all ages have fallen instantly in love with these Little Women. Their story transcends time - making this novel endure as a classic piece of American literature that has captivated generations of readers with its charm, wit, and poignant insights.


About the Author:

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 early on came under the influence of the great men of his circle: Emerson, Hawthorne, the preacher Theodore Parker, and Thoreau. From her youth, Louisa worked at various tasks to help support her family: sewing, teaching, domestic service, and writing. In 1862, she volunteered to serve as an army nurse in a Union hospital during the Civil War-- an experience that provided her material for her first successful book, Hospital Sketches (1863). Between 1863 and 1869, she published several anonymous and pseudonymous Gothic romances and lurid thrillers. But fame came with the publication of her Little Women (1868- 69), a novel based on the childhood adventures of the four Alcott sisters, which received immense popular acclaim and brought her financial security as well as the conviction to continue her career as a writer. 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 two adult novels, Moods (1864) and Work (1873). An active participant in the women's suffrage and temperance movements during the last decade of her life, Alcott died in Boston in 1888, on the day her father was buried.