num_pages: 432
description: Through no fault of her own, Louisa May Alcott is mainly remembered for a book which she despised, as much as she loathed the celebrity it brought her: Little Women. Sales in the millions may be all very well, but Louisa May was remarkable for other reasons. Now, Martha Saxon has written the first modern biography of the ambivalent rebel and irreverent feminist who became our most popular author, in spite of herself.Louisa May Alcott's story of the March family is really the story of the Alcotts -- and the truth is far different from the author's often syrupy fantasy. Her father, Bronson, let his wife and daughters suffer while he philosophized. He did not believe in working for wages but he was perfectly willing to have his wife and daughters do it for him. It was Louisa's pen that would eventually save them all from starvation, but at great cost to her own health and happiness. Outwardly a self-sacrificing, if slightly eccentric, New England spinster, Louisa May Alcott lived a rich inner life that enabled her to deal with her father's indifference and to create, under a pseudonym, heroines who smoked hashish and exacted vengeance against uncaring males.Martha Saxton has also written an account of a special time and place: New England in its flowering. Here is Boston in the midst of antislavery riots. Here are Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau (whom Louisa May secretly loved), the literary greats of a Concord that sometimes sounds like a village out of Chekov. Or characters such as the Reverend Theodore Parker, who liked to think of himself as the most unpopular man in America; Ellery Channing, whom Louisa May described as a "mood once claiming to be a man"; and the weird crew of ascetics who populated that ship of fools known as the utopian colony of Fruitlands.But most of all, this is the story of the curious, contentious, and ever unwilling bond between Louisa May and Bronson Alcott--a bond so powerful that they would even die within two days of each other.
language: English
title: Louisa May Alcott: A Modern Biography
titlecomplete: Louisa May Alcott: A Modern Biography
genres: Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, Biography, Books About Books
ratings_count: 103
awards: awardedAt: 252489600000
name: Laurence L. & Thomas Winship/PEN New England Award
publisher: The Noonday Press