Classic Starts®: Little Women

Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel, set during the Civil War, has always captivated even the most reluctant readers. Follow the adventures of the four March sisters—Meg, Beth, Amy, and, most of all, the tomboy Jo—as they experience the joys and disappointments, tragedies and triumphs, of growing up.

Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet best known as the author of the novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels Little Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886). Raised in New England by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott, she grew up among many well-known intellectuals of the day, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.