ПК 1 Англ яз 1,2 семестры / Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet best known as the author of the novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886).

Alcott's family suffered from financial difficulties, and while she worked to help support the family from an early age, she also sought an outlet in writing. She began to receive critical success for her writing in the 1860s. Early in her career, Alcott sometimes used pen names such as A. M. Barnard. In 1868 she published «Little Women». The novel was well received at the time and is still popular today among both children and adults. It has been adapted many times to stage, film, and television. In early age she was forced to work to help her family, which lived very poorly and they constantly moved from place to place. Most of the education she received, though, came from her father, who was strict. She also received some instruction from writers and educators such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, and Julia Ward Howe, all of whom were family friends. In 1847, she and her family served as station masters on the Underground Railroad. Alcott was the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Massachusetts in a school board election. The 1850s were hard times for the Alcotts, and in 1854 Louisa found solace at the Boston Theatre, where she wrote The Rival Prima Donnas, which she later burned due to a quarrel between the actresses on who would play what role. At one point in 1857, unable to find work and filled with despair, Alcott contemplated suicide. During that year, she read Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Brontë and found many parallels to her own life. In 1858, her younger sister Elizabeth died and her older sister Anna married a man named John Pratt. This felt to Alcott like a breaking up of their sisterhood.

As an adult, Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist. In 1860, Alcott began writing for the Atlantic Monthly. Her letters home (collected as Hospital Sketches) brought her first critical recognition for her observations and humor. Her novel Moods (1864), based on her own experience, was also promising. In the mid-1860s she wrote passionate, fiery novels and sensational stories. She also produced stories for children, and after they became popular, she did not go back to writing for adults. Other books she wrote are the novelette A Modern Mephistopheles (1875), which people thought Julian Hawthorne wrote, and the semi-autobiographical novel Work (1873). Alcott became even more successful with the first part of Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (1868). Little Women was well-received, with critics and audiences finding it suitable for many age groups—a fresh, natural representation of daily life.

In 1877, Alcott was one of the founders of the Women's Educational and Industrial Union in Boston. After her youngest sister May died in 1879, Louisa took over the care of her niece, Lulu.

Alcott died of a stroke at age 55 in Boston, on March 6, 1888. Many of her works were written under a pseudonym, and those that aren’t, describe her real life.