Keep good company, read good books, love good things and cultivate soul and body as faithfully as you can.
—Louisa May Alcott
Source: Wikimedia
Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, to social worker Abby May and philosopher and writer Amos Bronson Alcott. The family moved to Boston in 1843, and her father became involved in the transcendentalist movement. Alcott, therefore, spent her childhood surrounded by the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Theodore Parker.
The oldest of four girls, Alcott developed a love for writing at an early age. However, because her family was of modest means, she undertook many odd jobs in her teens and early adult years to help make ends meet.
She was finally able to focus on her writing in 1854, when she published her first book, Flower Fables. This book gained recognition, and she continued to write and publish her work.
When the American Civil War broke out, she decided to become a volunteer nurse. She left home but then contracted typhoid due to unsanitary hospital conditions. The illness required her to return to Boston, and she never fully recovered from the effects of typhoid.
Some good did come out of her time as a nurse. In 1863, she published the letters she had written home during the Civil War as a collection called Hospital Sketches, which brought her widespread ...
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