Introduction
Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) was an American novelist best known for the novel Little Women, which she wrote in 1868. Alcott was born in Philadelphia but lived mostly in Concord, Massachusetts where her family briefly moved to the Utopian Fruitland Community. Her family was friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller and Alcott was influenced by their Transcendentalist ideas. Alcott was both an abolitionist and a feminist and was the first woman to register to vote in Concord. Her first book, Flower Fables, was written in 1855, after which followed many works. Alcott never married although she took her sister's May two-year-old daughter, Louisa May Nieriker, to live with her when May died in 1879.
BYU’s Louisa May Alcott Collection consists of primary and secondary works relating to the life and career of Louisa May Alcott. The collection started in the mid 1980s, when BYU acquired a significant portion of works from the rare book dealer Leona Rostenberg, and her associate and Alcott scholar, Madeleine Stern. As part of this collection BYU actively seeks to collect all editions of works by Alcott, as well as secondary works about Alcott and her father, Amos Bronson Alcott. These secondary works include biographies and criticism.
Examples of works from the Alcott collection include the following:
- Little Women; or, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1868 [and] Part Second of Little Women; or, Meg, Job, Beth, and Amy. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1869.
- Flower Fables. Boston: George W. Briggs & Co., 1855.
- Hospital Sketches. Boston: James Redpath, 1863.