Malyssa Williamson4/27/00 Louisa May Alcott Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Amos Bronson Alcott, an educator and philosopher, and Abigail May, the energetic, philanthropist. Louisa grew up in Concord and Boston, suffering from poverty as a result of her selfish idealist father's inability to support his family. Bronson Alcott habitually sacrificed his wife and daughters by refusing to compromise with a venal world, most conspicuously when he subjected them to an experiment in ascetic communal living at Fruitlands farm in 1843. However, the Alcotts' intellectual environment was rich and stimulating: Louisa's parents assidously encouraged her writing, and her friends included leaders in abolition and women's rights, including the Transcendental philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau. Louisa took nature walks with Thoreau and had the run of Emerson's library.By the time she had reached her teens, she felt a responsibility to help her mother and older sister provide for the family. She taught, sewed, worked as a domestic and a companion, and wrote fairy tales and romantic thrillers. When the Civil War broke out, she was eager to participate, animated by her dislike of female passivity as well as her hatred of slavery. She enlisted as a nurse ans served for three weeks in an army hospital in Washington, D.C., until she contracted typhoid fever. She was treated with mercury, which permanently undermined her health. The experience did, however, provide material for her Hospital Sketches, which vividly combines heartbreaking pathos in death of a gental, stoical blacksmith, indignation at male official callousness and mismanagement, and humorous self-portrayal as the warmhearted, hot- tempered, down-to-earth Nurse Tribulation Periwinkle. In that year, she proudly recorded in her journal, she earned almost $600 "by my writing alone," of which she "sp...
