Little Women

Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1832. Two years later, she moved with her family to Boston and in 1840 to Concord, which was to remain her family home for the rest of her life. Her father, Bronson Alcott, was a transcendentalist and friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Alcott early realized that her father could not be counted on as sole support of his family, and so she sacrificed much of her own pleasure to earn money by sewing, teaching, and churning out potboilers. Her reputation was established with Hospital Sketches (1863), which was an account of her work as a volunteer nurse in Washington, D.C. Alcott's first works were written for children, including her best-known Little Women (1868--69) and Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo's Boys (1871). Moods (1864), a "passionate conflict," was written for adults. Alcott's writing eventually became the family's main source of income. Throughout her life, Alcott continued to produce highly popular and idealistic literature for children. An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Eight Cousins (1875), Rose in Bloom (1876), Under the Lilacs (1878), and Jack and Jill (1881) enjoyed wide popularity. At the same time, her adult fiction, such as the autobiographical novel Work: A Story of Experience (1873) and A Modern Mephistopheles (1877), a story based on the Faust legend, shows her deeper concern with such social issues as education, prison reform, and women's suffrage. She realistically depicts the problems of adolescents and working women, the difficulties of relationships between men and women, and the values of the single woman's life. George Stade was born George Gustave Comins in Manhattan, New York on November 25, 1933. He received a bachelor's degree in English from St. Lawrence University in 1955 and a master's degree in English in 1958 and a doctorate in English in 1965, both from Columbia University. He was a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University for 36 years until his retirement in 2000. He specialized in 20th-century American and British literature. The Society of Columbia Graduates awarded him the Great Teacher Award in 1996, citing his work writing book reviews for The Times and editing the Columbia Essays on Modern Writers. He wrote four novels including Confessions of a Lady-Killer. His articles and essays appeared in Partisan Review, The Hudson Review, The Paris Review, Harper's, The Nation, and The New Republic. He was also the consulting editorial director of Barnes & Noble Classics and editor in chief of Scribner's British Writers and European Writers series. He died from pneumonia on February 26, 2019 at the age of 85.