Louisa May Alcott was born in 1832 in Germantown (now part of Philadelphia), Pennsylvania, USA. She was the second of four girls. Her father was a philosopher and teacher who taught his daughters at home. The family moved to Concord when Louisa was a little girl and she grew up among her father's friends, Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne who were great thinkers and literary writers. Young Louisa was greatly influenced by their views about freedom and equality and the possibility for self-improvement through discipline. For instance, her family didn't wear cotton clothes because cotton was grown and harvested by slaves.

Alcott began writing adventure stories at a young age but it was Little Women that made her famous. By now,the family was living in Orchard House in Concord. Alcott wrote Little Women in this house and set the story in its neighbourhood. It is semi autobiographical for Jo, who wans to be man of the house when Father is away, is much like Alcott herself in shouldering the responsibilities of her family, and her sisters are modelled after Louisa's sisters, Anna, Elizabeth and May. Good Wives, the sequel, carries the story forward towards weddings and new families. Alcott continued the saga of the March family with two more novels. Little Men (1871) is about the boys in a school that Jo runs in Plumfield, and Jo's Boys (1886) is an account of the students from Plumfield who follow very different paths as grown-up men.