Louisa May Alcott was born on 29 November 1832 and raised in New England by her transcendentalist parents, growing up among writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau. Her family struggled financially, and she took on various jobs from an early age while also writing for money.
Her first critical success, Hospital Sketches, drew on her service as a nurse in the American Civil War. She is best known for Little Women (1868), loosely based on her own life with her three sisters, and its sequels. She died on 6 March 1888.