was born on this date in 1832.
Garrison Keillor has this interesting background on The Writer’s Almanac.
It’s the birthday of Louisa May Alcott, born in Germantown, Pennsylvania (1832), but brought up in Concord, Massachusetts, among the Transcendentalists, of which her father was one. She’s remembered now for Little Women (1869), which she found tedious to write. In her journal she wrote, “I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing.” She much preferred writing lurid, Gothic stories, about women who sold their souls to the devil, and governesses who looked sweet and innocent by day but who ruined the souls of little children by night. She published these stories under several different pen names. Her publishers offered her more money if she would agree to publish under her own name, but she could not bring herself to embarrass her father and his colleague, Ralph Waldo Emerson. She wrote to a friend, “To have had Mr. Emerson for an intellectual god all one’s life is to be invested with a chain armor of propriety.”