Louisa May Alcott was born on November 29th, 1832 in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. Her parents, Bronson and Abby Alcott, were transcendentalists and her father was a radical school teacher. She spent much of her early life in Massachusetts, where her family eventually settled at the Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts, which was the inspiration for much of the writing in Little Women. In her young adult life she had several jobs in domestic service and as a governess. When the US Civil War broke out she went to Washington to serve as a nurse for the Union Army. It was this experience which led to her to write her first true work of literature, Hospital Sketches, a dramatic retelling of letters she sent home during her time as a nurse.

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Afterward, the success of her early work she went on to write Little Women in 1868, followed by a second volume in 1869. What followed was a continued outpouring of literature relating to the characters she created in Little Women, with two other novels. Through the publication of these novels she was able to live financially independently and never married. This was quite scandalous at the time, but this freedom allowed her to write at will over the course of her life. She died on March 6th, 1888.