Little Women is the story for which Louisa May Alcott is most famous, but it captures just a sliver of her literary charisma. Alcott wrote poetry, pulp fiction, and fairy stories, all with the same vivacity of spirit that made her magnetic to those who knew her. She carried with her an air of rebelliousness that electrified her work. She could be cutting, flirtatious, scheming, and witty all at once.

Alcott spent her childhood surrounded by Concord’s transcendentalists. As a teenager, she wrote love letters to Ralph Waldo Emerson, her dear friend and mentor, but burned them before sending. Instead, on moonlit walks she picked wildflowers that she left on his doorstep. 

She was a devoted abolitionist who argued in her stories for the moral justification of enslaved people committing violence against those who enslaved them. During the Civil War, furious that she was not permitted to fight, she volunteered as a nurse for the Union Army and worked nights in a hospital, where she helped carry out amputations and comfort dying soldiers. Her 1863 Atlantic story “The Brothers” drew on this experience.  

“I’d rather be a free spinster,” Alcott once wrote, “and paddle my own canoe.”

Alcott’s body of work is among the most important in American letters, but her greatest contribution may be in her imagination for what was possible. Nora Ephron, Susan Sontag, Gertrude Stein, Simone de Beauvoir, Ursula Le Guin, and too many others to name have cited Louisa May Alcott as a foundational influence. Her exuberance, her independence, and her literary superstardom told generations of writers that they, too, could write. They, too, could live.