APPENDIX ALCOTT, Louisa May
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APPENDIX ALCOTT, Louisa May. American. Born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, 29 November 1832; daughter of the philosopher Amos Bronson Alcott. Educated at home, with instruction from Thoreau, Emerson, and Theodore Parker. Teacher; army nurse during the Civil War; seamstress; domestic servant. Edited the children's magazine Merry's Museum in the 1860's. Died 6 March 1888. PUBLICATIONS FOR CHILDREN Fiction Flower Fables. Boston, Briggs, 1855. The Rose Family: A Fairy Tale. Boston, Redpath, 1864. Morning-Glories and Other Stories, illustrated by Elizabeth Greene. New York, Carleton, 1867. Three Proverb Stories. Boston. Loring, 1868. Kitty's Class Day. Boston, Loring, 1868. Aunt Kipp. Boston, Loring, 1868. Psyche's Art. Boston, Loring, 1868. Little Women; or, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, illustrated by Mary Alcott. Boston. Roberts. 2 vols., 1868-69; as Little Women and Good Wives, London, Sampson Low, 2 vols .. 1871. An Old-Fashioned Girl. Boston, Roberts, and London, Sampson Low, 1870. Will's Wonder Book. Boston, Fuller, 1870. Little Men: Life at Pluff?field with Jo 's Boys. Boston, Roberts, and London. Sampson Low, 1871. Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag: My Boys, Shawl-Straps, Cupid and Chow-Chow, My Girls, Jimmy's Cruise in the Pinafore, An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving. Boston. Roberts. and London, Sampson Low, 6 vols., 1872-82. Eight Cousins; or, The Aunt-Hill. Boston, Roberts, and London, Sampson Low. 1875. Rose in Bloom: A Sequel to "Eight Cousins." Boston, Roberts, 1876. Under the Lilacs. London, Sampson Low, 1877; Boston, Roberts, 1878. Meadow Blossoms. New York, Crowell, 1879. Water Cresses. New York, Crowell, 1879. Jack and Jill: A Village Story. Boston, Roberts, and London, Sampson Low. 1880. Proverb Stories. Boston, Roberts, and London. Sampson Low, 1882. Spinning- Wheel Stories. Boston, Roberts, and London, Sampson Low, 1884. Jo 's Boys and How They Turned Out: A Sequel to "Little Men." Boston, Roberts, and London, Sampson Low, 1886. Lulu's Library: A Christmas Dream, The Frost King, Recollections. Boston, Roberts, and London, Sampson Low, 3 vols .. 1886--89. A Garland for Girls. Boston, Roberts, and London, Black.ie, 1888. A Round Dozen: Stories, edited by Anne Thaxter Eaton. New York, Viking Press, 1963. Glimpses of Louisa: A Centennial Sampling of the Best Short Stories, edited by Cornelia Meigs. Boston, Little Brown, 1968. Louisa's Wonder Book: An Unknown Alcott Juvenile, edited by Madeleine B. Stern. Mount Pleasant, Michigan, Clarke Historical Library, 1975. PUBLICATIONS FOR ADULTS Novels Moods. Boston, Loring, 1865; London, Routledge, 1866; revised edition, Boston, Roberts, 1882. 1391 ALCOTT CHILDREN'S WRITERS The Mysterious Key and What It Opened. Boston, Elliott Thomes and Talbot, 1867. V. V.; or, Plots and Counterplots (as A.M. Barnard). Boston, Elliott Thomes and Talbot, 1871. Work:A Story q{Experience. Boston, Roberts, 1873; London, Sampson Low, 2 vols., 1873. Beginning Again, Being a Continuation of" Work." London, Sampson Low, 1875. A Modern Mephistopheles (published anonymously). Boston, Roberts, 1877. A Modern Mephistopheles, and A Whisper in the Dark. Boston, Roberts, 1889. Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers, edited by Madeleine B. Stern. New York, Morrow, 1975. Plots and Counterplots: More Unknown Thrillers, edited by Madeleine B. Stern. New York, Morrow, 1976; London, W.H. Allen, 1977. Short Stories On Picket Duty and Other Tales. Boston, Redpath, 1864. Silver Pitchers, and Independence: A Centennial Love Story. Boston, Roberts, 1876; as Silver Pitchers and Other Stories, London. Sampson Low, 1876. Plays Comic Tragedies Written by "Jo" and "Meg" and Acted by the "Little Women." edited by A.B. Pratt. Boston, Roberts, and London, Sampson Low, 1893. Other Hospital Sketches. Boston, Redpath, 1863; revised edition, as Hospital Sketches and Camp and Fireside Stories, Boston, Roberts, 1869. Nelly's Hospital. Washington, D.C., United States Sanitary Commission, 1868. Something to Do. London, Ward Lock, 1873. A Glorious Fourth. Boston, The Press, 1887. What It Cost. Boston, The Press, 1887. Jimmy's Lecture. Boston, The Press, 1887. Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals, edited by Ednah D. Cheney. Boston, Roberts, and London, Sampson Low, 1889. Recollections qf My Childhood's Days. London, Sampson Low, 1890. A Sprig qf Andromeda: A Letter on the Death qf Henry David Thoreau. New York, Pierpont Morgan library, 1962. Bibliography: in Louisa's Wonder Book, edited by Madeleine B. Stern, Mount Pleasant, Michigan, Clarke Historical library, 1975. Critical Studies: Louisa May Alcott by Madeleine B. Stern, Norman. University of Oklahoma Press, 1950, London, Peter Nevill, 1952; Miss Alcott o.fConcord by Marjorie Worthington, New York, Doubleday, 1958; Louisa May Alcott and the American Family Story by Cornelia Meigs, London, Bodley Head, 1970. New York, Walck, 1971. In 1868 when, at the request of Thomas Niles of Roberts Brothers, Louisa May Alcott sat down to write a household story for girls, the domestic novel as evolved by Susan Warner, Maria Cummins, Ann Stephens and Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth consisted of commonplace episodes worked into a trite plot involving pious and insipid characters. Bronson Alcott's opinion of juvenile literature, recorded in his diary for 1839, had, in the generation that followed, been given no cause for alteration. In 1868 it was still true that the "literature of 1392 CHILDREN'S WRITERS ALCOTI childhood" had not been written. If such extraordinarily moral tales as The Wide, Wide World, the Rollo books, the Lucy books, and the first of the Elsie books became unbearable, there was compensation for a youthful reader only in grave-and-horror stories, Hawthorne's legendary tales or "Peter Parley's" edifying descriptions of natural wonders. The times were ripe for Louisa Alcott and she was well equipped to fill the gap in domestic literature. With the publication of Little Women ( 1868-1869) she created a domestic novel for children destined to influence writers in that genre for generations to come. Responding to her publisher's request, she drew her characters from those of her own sisters, her scenes from the New England where she had grown up, and many of her episodes from those she and her family had experienced. In all this she was something of a pioneer, adapting her autobiography to the creation of a juvenile novel and achieving a realistic but wholesome picture of family life with which young readers could readily identify. The literary influence of Bunyan and Dickens, Carlyle and Hawthorne, Emerson, Theodore Parker and Thoreau can be traced in her work, but primarily she drew upon autobiographical sources for her plot and her characters, finding in her family and neighbors the groundwork for her three-dimensional characters. Her perceptively drawn adolescents. the Marches, modeled upon her sisters and herself, were not merely lifelike but alive. Her episodes, from the opening selection of a Christmas gift to the plays in the barn, from Jo March's literary career to Beth's death, were thoroughly believable for they had been lived. The Alcott humor which induced a chuckle at a homeiy phrase was appreciated by children. The Alcott poverty was sentimentalized; the eccentric Alcott father was an adumbrated shadow; yet, for all the glossing over, the core of the domestic drama was apparent. Reported simply and directly in a style that obeyed her injunction "Never use a long word, when a short one will do as well," the narrative embodied the simple facts and persons of a family and so filled a gap in the literature of childhood. Louisa Alcott had unlatched the door to one house, and "all find it is their own house which they enter." 20th-century writers for children who aim at credibility and verisimilitude in their reconstructions of contemporary family life are all, in one way or another, indebted to Louisa May Alcott. By the time she created Little Women she had served a long apprenticeship and was already a professional writer. She had edited a juvenile monthly. Merry's Museum, and produced several books aimed at a juvenile readership: her first published book, Flower Fables. "legends of faery land"; The Rose Fami(v: A Fairy Tale; and Morning-Glories and Other Stories, readable short stories in which autobiographical details were combined with nature lore and moral tidbits. Alcott had also written in a variety of genres for a wide range of adult readers. weaving stories of sweetness and light, dramatic narratives of strong-minded women and poor lost creatures, realistic episodes of the Civil War. and blood-and-thunder thrillers of revenge and passion whose leading character was usually a vindictive and manipulating heroine. From the exigencies of serialization for magazines she had developed the skills of the cliff-hanger and the page-turner. Her first full-length novel. Moods, was a narrative of stormy passion and violence, death and intellectual love in which she attempted to apply Emerson's remark: "life is a train of moods like a string of beads." Off and on, she had worked at her autobiographical and feminist novel Success, subsequently renamed Work: A Story of Experience. By 1868. Alcott had run a gamut of literary experimentation from stories of virtue rewarded to stories of vice unpunished. She had attempted tales of escape and realism and stirred her literary ingredients in a witch's cauldron before she kindled the fire in a family hearth. With few exceptions - notably A Modern Mephistopheles in which she reverted to the sensational themes of her earlier blood-and-thunders - Louisa Alcott clung to that family hearth during the remainder of her career. Between 1868 when Part One of Little Women appeared and 1888 when she died, she produced in her so-called Little Women Series a string of wholesome domestic narratives more or less autobiographical in origin, simple and direct in style, perceptive in the characterization of adolescents.