Louisa May Alcott was born in 1832 and grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, the second of four daughters in a family that was often poor. From her teens she worked as a seamstress, teacher and servant, and wrote stories to help pay the bills.

During the Civil War she served as a nurse. Her publisher then asked her for a book for girls, and she wrote Little Women in 1868, drawing on her own sisters. Its success brought the family security at last. She never married, and she died in 1888.