Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, Paperback, 9780553212754 | Buy online at The Nile
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Little Women

Author: Louisa May Alcott   Series: Bantam Classics

Paperback

Jo, Beth, Meg, Amy and their mother endure the hardships of poverty while the girls' father is away fighting in the Civil War.

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PRODUCT INFORMATION

Summary

Jo, Beth, Meg, Amy and their mother endure the hardships of poverty while the girls' father is away fighting in the Civil War.

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Description

Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS'sThe Great American ReadIt is no surprise thatLittle Women,the adored classic of four devoted sisters, was loosely based on Louisa May Alcott's own life. In fact, Alcott drew from her own personality to create a heroine unlike any seen before- Jo, willful, headstrong, and undoubtedly the backbone of the March family. Follow the sisters from innocent adolescence to sage adulthood, with all the joy and sorrow of life in between, and fall in love with them and this endearing story. Praised by Madeleine Stern as "a book on the American home, and hence universal in its appeal,"Little Womenhas been an avidly read tale for generations.

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Critic Reviews

“"The American female myth." -Madelon Bedell From the Trade Paperback edition.”

"The American female myth."—Madelon Bedell

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About the Author

Louisa May Alcott, born in 1832, was the second child of Bronson Alcott of Concord, Massachusetts, a self-taught philosopher, school reformer, and utopian who was much too immersed in the world of ideas to ever succeed in supporting his family. That task fell to his wife and later to his enterprising daughter Louisa May. While her father lectured, wrote, and conversed with such famous friends as Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau, Louisa taught school, worked as a seamstress and nurse, took in laundry, and even hired herself out as a domestic servant at age nineteen. The small sums she earned often kept the family from complete destitution, but it was through her writing that she finally brought them financial independence. "I will make a battering-ram of my head," she wrote in her journal, "and make a way through this rough-and-tumble world."An enthusiastic participant in amateur theatricals since age ten, she wrote her first melodrama at age fifteen and began publishing poems and sketches at twenty-one. Her brief service as a Civil War nurse resulted in Hospital Sketches (1863), but she earned more from the lurid thrillers she began writing in 1861 under the pseudonym of A.M. Barnard. These tales, with titles like "Pauline's Passion and Punishment," featured strong-willed and flamboyant heroines but were not identified as Alcott's work until the 1940s.Fame and success came unexpectedly in 1868. When a publisher suggested she write a "girl's book," she drew on her memories of her childhood and wrote Little Women, depicting herself as Jo March, while her sisters Anna, Abby May, and Elizabeth became Meg, Amy, and Beth. She re-created the high spirits of the Alcott girls and took many incidents from life but made the March family financially comfortable as the Alcotts never had been. Little Women, to its author's surprise, struck a cord an America's largely female reading public and became a huge success. Louisa was prevailed upon to continue the story, which she did in Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886.) In 1873 she published Work- A Story of Experience, an autobiography in fictional disguise with an all too appropriate title.Now a famous writer, she continued to turn out novels and stories and to work for the women's suffrage and temperance movements, as her father had worked for the abolitionists. Bronson Alcott and Louisa May Alcott both died in Boston in the same month, March of 1888.

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Back Cover

Little Women is one of the best-loved books of all time. Lovely Meg, talented Jo, frail Beth, spoiled Amy: these are the four March sisters, who learn the hard lessons of poverty and of growing up in New England during the Civil War. Through their dreams, plays, pranks, letters, illnesses, and courtships, women of all ages have become a part of this remarkable family and have felt their deep sadness when Meg leaves the circle of sisters to be married at the end of Part I. Part II chronicles Meg's joys and mishaps as a young wife and mother, Jo's struggle to become a writer, Beth's tragedy, and Amy's artistic pursuits and unexpected romance. Based on Louisa May Alcott's childhood, this lively portrait of nineteenth-century family life possesses a lasting vitality that has endeared it to generations of readers. This Bantam Classic edition contains Parts I and II in their entirety. With an Afterword by Nina Auerbach.

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Product Details

Publisher
Random House USA Inc | Bantam Books Inc
Published
1st April 1983
Pages
560
ISBN
9780553212754

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$19.50
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