Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) was an acclaimed American writer best known for writing Little Women and its sequels.
Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist. In her early career, she served as a nurse during the Civil War, and her letters home were later published in the Boston anti-slavery paper Commonwealth and collected into the book Hospital Sketches. She then transitioned to writing gothic thrillers, which notably featured strong and smart female protagonists, and she is credited with writing one of the earliest works of detective fiction in American literature.
Alcott wrote Little Women as a semi-autobiographical account of her own New England childhood, and it was immediately well-received. The series, groundbreaking for combining a frank depiction of 19th-century domestic America with a young woman's coming-of-age tale, remains popular today and has been adapted many times to stage, film, and television.
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