1869: Alcott

Fruitlands

Louisa May Alcott is ten years old in 1843, when her father Bronson founds Fruitlands: "a vegetarian reform community near Concord that banned money and regarded participants as members of one large family. His family moved there, but after several months of hardship in which, according to his wife’s view, the men did nothing but think and the women did all the hard physical work, Abigail [Louisa’s mother], threatened to leave with her children, even if that meant severing ties with her husband. He reluctantly gave up on the project early in 1844 and moved the family back to Concord (Alcott would later satirize the community in her short story ‘Transcendental Wild Oats’ [1873].) Because Bronson had invested all of his money in Fruitlands, for years afterwards the Alcotts lived in poverty” (Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Ninth Edition: Beginnings to 1865, 1304).

Union Hotel Hospital in Washington, D.C.

"Beginning in December 1862, [Alcott] worked at the unsanitary and poorly run Union Hotel Hospital in Washington, D.C., overseeing amputations and comforting the many men who were dying. The work took its toll, and by late January of 1863, she was suffering from typhoid pneumonia and had to give up nursing" (Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Ninth Edition: Beginnings to 1865, 1305).

Incest! Suicide! Drug Addiction!

“Eager for money and desirous of experimenting with fiction that would allow her to write unconventionally about such topics as incest, suicide, drug addiction, sexual passion, and the supernatural, [Alcott] began publishing melodramatic sensation stories under the name of A. M. Barnard earning around $100 (around $1200[+] in today’s currency) for each story. Those stories, discovered by the critic Madeleine Stern during the 1980s and 1990s, helped transform critics’ understanding of Alcott, who for over a century was known mainly as the author of Little Women” ( Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Ninth Edition: Beginnings to 1865, 1305).

Little Women

Part I is written and published in 1868, while Louisa May is living with her parents in Concord.  Part II, including "Literary Lessons," is published in 1869. The successful semi-autobiographical novel "allows Alcott to pay off her family's debts and support her mother and father" (Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Ninth Edition: Beginnings to 1865, 1306).

Legacy

Over an approximatley forty-year career as a writer, Alcott produced a "wide range" of "children's fiction, realistic novels and short stories, and . . .  slyly comic melodramas and sensation fiction," which have "been brought back into print in recent decades" (Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Ninth Edition: Beginnings to 1865, 1306).