Born in Connecticut in 1799, Alcott had only minimal formal schooling before attempting a career as a traveling salesman.

Alcott married Abby May in 1830 and they eventually had four surviving children, all daughters.

At age 17, Alcott passed the exam for a teaching certificate but had trouble finding work as a teacher.

While working on a second book, Alcott and Peabody had a falling out and Conversations with Children on the Gospels was prepared with help from Peabody's sister Sophia, published at the end of December 1836.

Alcott was rejected by most public opinion and, by the summer of 1837, he had only 11 students left and no assistant after Margaret Fuller moved to Providence, Rhode Island.

The controversy had caused many parents to remove their children and, as the school closed, Alcott became increasingly financially desperate.

The school's founder, James Pierpont Greaves, had only recently died but Alcott was invited to stay there for a week.

As Alcott had published earlier, " Our wine is water, — flesh, bread ; — drugs, fruits.

Alcott had high expectations but was often away when the community most needed him as he attempted to recruit more members.

Lane believed Alcott had misled him into thinking enough people would join the enterprise and developed a strong dislike for the nuclear family.

“ Alcott particularly battled the conventional marriage plot in writing Little Women ” Alcott did not have Jo accept Laurie ’ s hand in marriage ; rather, when she finally had Jo get married, she picked an unconventional man for Jo ’ s husband.

In the years following the book's publication, responses to the tale were published by W. M. Swepstone ( Christmas Shadows, 1850 ), Horatio Alger ( Job Warner's Christmas, 1863 ), Louisa May Alcott ( A Christmas Dream, and How It Came True, 1882 ), and others who followed Scrooge's life as a reformed man – or some who thought Dickens had gotten it wrong and needed to be corrected.

Because of her family ’ s prominence in Boston society, Perry had access from an early age to such literary greats as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, and James Russell Lowell.

She had outlasted most of her contemporaries such as King, Patty Sheehan and Amy Alcott, remaining competitive on the LPGA Tour.

It has been read as a family drama that validates virtue over wealth .” Little Women has been read “ as a means of escaping that life by women who knew its gender constraints only too well .” Alcott “ combines many conventions of the sentimental novel with crucial ingredients of Romantic children ’ s fiction, creating a new form of which Little Women is a unique model .” Elbert argued that within Little Women can be found the first vision of the “ American Girl ” and that her multiple aspects are embodied in the differing March sisters.

However, in that decade, progressive reformers such as Alcott, influenced by Pestalozzi as well as Friedrich Fröbel and Johann Friedrich Herbart, began to advocate writing about subjects from students ' personal experiences.

His decision to pursue sculpting was influenced by Louisa May Alcott's sister May Alcott.

Other writers influenced by Transcendentalism were Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, George Ripley, Orestes Brownson, and Jones Very.

His philosophy is clearly influenced by his family's Congregationalism, by Enlightenment humanism, by Hegel's dialectical philosophy of history, and by the philosophers of Transcendentalism and the Second Great Awakening, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller and Bronson Alcott.

On November 6, 1827, Alcott started teaching in Bristol, Connecticut, still using the same methods he used in Cheshire, but opposition from the community surfaced quickly ; he was unemployed by March 1828.

In late April 1840 Alcott moved to the town of Concord urged by Emerson.

Persuaded in part by Lane's abolitionist views, Alcott took a stand against the John Tyler administration's plan to annex Texas as a slave territory and refused to pay his poll tax.

Abby May wrote in her journal on January 17, 1843, " A day of some excitement, as Mr. Alcott refused to pay his town tax ... After waiting some time to be committed jail, he was told it was paid by a friend.

Louisa May Alcott, who was ten years old at the time, later wrote of the experience in Transcendental Wild Oats ( 1873 ): " The band of brothers began by spading garden and field ; but a few days of it lessened their ardor amazingly.

In January 1844, Alcott moved his family to Still River, a village within Harvard but, on March 1, 1845, the family returned to Concord to live in a home they named " The Hillside " ( later renamed " The Wayside " by Nathaniel Hawthorne ).

There, next door to Peabody's book store on West Street, Bronson Alcott hosted a series based on the " Conversations " model by Margaret Fuller called " A Course on the Conversations on Man — his History, Resources, and Expectations ".

Alcott asked Niles if he would publish a book of short stories by his daughter ; instead, he suggested she write a book about girls.

It has continued functioning with a Summer Conversational Series in its original building at Orchard House, now run by the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association.

* Bronson Alcott at Alcott house, England, and Fruitlands, New England ( 1842-1844 ) ( 1908 ) by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn

* Bronson Alcott: A glimpse at our vegetarian heritage, by Karen Iacobbo

This path was taken by some Transcendentalist educators, such as Amos Bronson Alcott.

Raised by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May Alcott and Amos Bronson Alcott in New England, she grew up among many of the well-known intellectuals of the day such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau.

* Work: A Story of Experience, a 1873 novel by Louisa May Alcott

In his early years he followed Transcendentalism, a loose and eclectic idealist philosophy advocated by Emerson, Fuller, and Alcott.

Boston alone saw at least a dozen productions, including a juvenile version described by Louisa May Alcott in her 1879 story, " Jimmy's Cruise in the Pinafore ".

Little Women is a novel by American author Louisa May Alcott ( 1832 – 1888 ).

Lane and Alcott collaborated on a major expansion of their educational theories into a Utopian society.

In the 19th century, the Swiss humanitarian Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi ; the American transcendentalists Amos Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau ; the founders of progressive education, John Dewey and Francis Parker ; and educational pioneers, such as Friedrich Fröbel, Maria Montessori and Rudolf Steiner ( founder of the Waldorf schools ); among others, all insisted that education should be understood as the art of cultivating the moral, emotional, physical, psychological, and spiritual aspects of the developing child.

Between 1838 and 1848, Ham Common was the site of a utopian spiritual community and free school called Alcott House ( or the " Ham Common Concordium ), founded by educational reformer and " sacred socialist " James Pierrepont Greaves and his followers.

Alcott also wrote a series patterned after the work of German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe which were eventually published in the Transcendentalists ' journal, The Dial.

Alcott “ made women ’ s rights integral to her stories, and above all to Little Women .” Alcott ’ s fiction became her “ most important feminist contribution ”— even considering all the effort Alcott made to help facilitate women ’ s rights.