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Douglas tells readers that, "Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania on 1832"(i). Soon after her birth, the family moved and settled in Concord, Massachusetts, where Alcott was inspired by fellow authors and neighbors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry Thoreau (i). Early in her life Louisa took on a large chunk of the family's financial burden through teaching and her writing. Parton found that due to Alcott's father's repeated failures in various trades, Alcott found it economically productive to create stories drawn from her own life experiences (78-82). Her experiences as a teacher, a volunteer nurse for the military hospitals, and simply as an American girl living in a communal environment were all elements that made up some of her most famous stories (86). Perhaps the most famous of all her works was the children's novel Little Women. This particular novel was created partially as an autobiography of the life of herself and her three sisters. Sheryl A. Englund states in her article that Alcott has told and stated that the material in her book was autobiographical (4). Her mother and father educated their children and urged them to keep journals doc
Throughout the novel, Little Women, Alcott draws on the similarities on characters in her own life, autobiographical events and the emotions felt by herself in order to create a more believable and touching story for her readers. Had Louisa May Alcott not lived the life that she did, the novel Little Women may not have been remembered as long as it has. Life experiences are often the most believable and touching elements of a novel. Louisa May Alcott used this autobiographical method when writing her famous novels and stories. This novel is forever imprinted in the mind of the reader due to raw honesty of Alcott as she related to her own trials and tribulations through the lives of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. Through the distinct similarities between the sisters in the novel and her own, the in-depth detail of autobiographical events in the novel, and the effect that these events have on the reader due to their autobiographical nature, Alcott has created a novel that will not soon be forgotten by the American girl. Many of the events described in Little Women were drawn from experiences that Louisa May Alcott experienced in her own life. For Example, Alcott was better able to describe the grief of the loss of Beth as she had also lost one of her sisters as a young girl (Keyser 60). Alcott is also very successfully able to convey the conflicts that each sister had within herself, as well as those between the sisters, as she lived the experience of four girls under one roof. "Jo is Alcott herself, and the constrictions on Jo as a character and ad an author in the family journal form were Louisa's as a woman, a writer, and Alcott, a citizen of 'pokey' Concord, and an American" (Douglas xvi). Louisa and Jo shared the same boyish nature, as both feels as if they were a "boy at heart" (xvi). Jo, at a young age, was seized by the bookmania, just as was Alcott, as a result of living so close to so many great men (Parton 8). While growing up, Louisa was forced to take on a large portion of her family's financial burden. She relates this experience through Jo's struggles to earn more money for her family, by writing and taking care of her crotchety aunt. From Jo's first attempt to sell a story to the newspaper to the eventual publication of her novel, Alcott directly follows her every emotion, triumph, and failure. This information is available to her due to her own experiences in the struggle to be a writer (84). It is even believed that "Jo's first visit to the "Spread Eagle " o
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Approximate Word count = 1679
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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