Louisa May Alcott

Alcott Louisa May's determination to escape from poverty by her various side stories and longer novels contributed to her writing career. She began writing at sixteen, convinced she could earn enough money to alleviate her family's lack of money. She earned five dollars for her first published poem. You have to include in your term paper that from the 1840's through 1860's, she wrote melodramatic short stories. These provided her with a steady income while she worked on her major novels. Her early works were compared with that of her admired writer Charles Dickens. In 1862, Louisa went to Washington D.C. to serve as a nurse to the wounded soldiers of the American Civil War. Soon following, she contracted a form of typhoid fever; which nearly killed her. She never fully recovered. These dreadful experiences were applied to a book of short stories called Hospital Sketches in 1863, first seen in the magazine Boston Commonwealth. Four years later, a man named Thomas Niles, Jr. of Boston publishing company requested Alcott to write a book for girls. She reclined to do so. Not too long after that, she changed her mind and figured out what girls would want to read about. Her career reached its climax when she published Little Women. The first of January in 1869, she added the sequel, Good Wives. Later the two books formed into one book entitled by her first book, Little Women. Although this was the most known of her novels, she also wrote: Little Men, Jo's Boys, An Old Fashioned Girl, and Eight Cousins, as well as many other wonderful novels. As Louisa's health continued to fail, she still gave her all to the well being of her family, until her death in March of 1888.

Little Women was based upon Louisa's own family and family life. The mood of the story was a poor but loving atmosphere. The March family was bonded together by love not money. Mrs. March was the cornerstone that the four girls referred to for guidance, confidence, and strengthening words of wisdom. This family clearly had but only enough money to survive from; yet they always found entertainment in acting out plays for their mother, editing their own weekly paper called "The Pickwick Portfolio", or going on outings with each other and sometimes including their neighbor friend, Laurie. These events relate to Alcott's own family experiences. The March family resembles the Alcott family. Marmee is Louisa's mother Abba. The March sisters are Meg who is Anna, Jo the alter ego of Louisa, Beth is Elizabeth (also known as Lizzie), and little Amy models after May. Jo's writing career is like that of Louisa's. Meg's courtship and marriage and Beth's death also take after the Alcott's life. Amy's journeys abroad in England for her painting talents are examples of May's adventures she took when she was a young woman. Jo's struggle against the bonds of domesticity, her literary ambition, and her active approach to life have made her one of the most admired and recognized heroines in American literature. Our writers may emphasize in a custom essay that Alcott took from her childhood experiences and enriched them with realistic detail to create a group of characters who seem to have actual existence.