Fan Favorite: Great American Authors | Louisa May Alcott: The Breadwinner | 2

0:13Imagine it's April 1854 in Boston, and you're in the offices of your publishing company, Tickner and Fields. Fatigue is getting the better of you as you sit at your desk, tapping your fingers against the worn wooden surface. All morning, you've been working your way through a stack of manuscripts, but so far, nothing's caught your interest. A young woman pulls back the heavy green curtain that separates you from your assistant. She wears a plain dress, and her dark hair is pinned back neatly. You recognize her as Louisa, the daughter of your friend Bronson Alcott. Ah, Miss Alcott. Please have a seat.

0:49You gesture toward the chair on the other side of your desk. She sits down, smiling nervously. Thank you, sir. What brings you here today? I've brought an essay for your consideration. You nod warily, stealing yourself to evaluate the work of a friend's daughter. You never expected her to visit your office unannounced. Ah, I see. Well, hand it over. With trembling hands, she hands you several handwritten pages. It's about the seven weeks I spent working as a companion and servant to an elderly man and his invalid daughter. The work was grueling, and my employer expected me to spend hours each day fawning over him.

1:30Well, after seven terrible weeks, I was only paid four dollars. It was a miserable experience, but I thought it would make for a good essay. You begin skimming the essay. The writing is earnest, but it lacks authority. It strikes you that it's little more than a list of complaints. You put the essay down and take a deep breath. Stick to your teaching, Miss Alcott. You can't write. She looks at you with disbelief. You didn't even read it properly. Please, you must read the whole piece before you deliver your verdict. I'm sorry. I've worked in the business long enough to know when something has potential.

2:09And when it doesn't. Please reconsider. I appreciate the courage it took to come here today and share your work. But writing is a challenging craft. Not everyone has the necessary skill. I'm sure you have other strengths. She stands abruptly, looking down at you with fire in her eyes. I can write, and I'm going to prove it to you. She walks out of your office, surprising you with her determination. You're left wondering if there's more to this young woman than meets the eye.

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3:28From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers, our history, your story.

3:50In the spring of 1854, 21-year-old aspiring writer Louisa May Alcott submitted an essay to editor and publisher James T. Fields. After a quick review, Fields told her that she had no future as a writer, but Alcott refused to give up. Alcott was raised in a vibrant community of writers and reformers who shaped her literary ambitions. Burdened by her family's overwhelming financial struggles, she turned to writing as an escape at a young age. Over the course of her life, Alcout would write hundreds of short stories, poems, and essays, but it was her beloved 1868 novel Little Women that propelled her to fame.

4:27Drawing from her own experiences growing up with three sisters in Concord, Massachusetts, Alcout filled her novel with realistic and relatable female characters grappling with the constraints of society's expectations. In a time of strict gender roles, Alcott charted an independent path for her life and her work and broadened the scope of American literature in the process. This is Episode 2 in our six-part series on great American authors, The Breadwinner.

4:56Louisa May Alcott was born on November 29, 1832, in Germantown, Pennsylvania. She was the second daughter of Amos Bronson Alcott, a progressive educator, and Abigail May, who was called Abba. Abba came from a long line of prominent New Englanders, including the Quincy's and Sewell's. Her husband, Bronson, was the eccentric, self-educated son of a poor farmer. The Alcots struggled financially, but they shared high-minded ideals. As Louisa grew up, she was immersed in discussions about philosophy, education, and social and political reform. In 1834, the Alkots moved to Boston, and Bronson opened the Experimental Temple School, where he taught the sons and daughters of Boston's elites.

5:38In Boston, Bronson joined the Transcendentalist Club and befriended the writers and philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. Transcendentalism was a spiritual and literary movement that spread throughout New England in the 1830s. Followers believed that individuals could find God within themselves by communing with nature rather than through the church. They emphasized individual intuition, self-reliance, and the inherent goodness of people. Bronson applied this philosophy to his teaching methods. At a time when most classrooms focused on lectures and memorization, he believed in engaging his students in conversation to help them discover knowledge themselves.

6:16But his unorthodox approach sparked controversy. When parents found out that he was discussing religion and sex with his students, many pulled their children from the school. When Bronson admitted a black girl to his classroom in 1839, outraged white parents withdrew most of the remaining students, and he was forced to close the Temple School for good. In 1840, the Alkots moved 16 miles west to rural Concord, Massachusetts, where Ralph Waldo Emerson rented them a run-down cottage. In Concord, Emerson was creating a vibrant literary community, home to Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and author Nathaniel Hawthorne.

6:52It would become the center of the transcendentalist movement and a hotbed of anti-slavery activism. By the time the Alkuts arrived in Concord, they had four daughters, Anna, Louisa, Lizzie, and May. Eight-year-old Louisa loved running free in Concord's meadows, taking walks through the woods with Thoreau, and borrowing books from Emerson's library. In Concord, Bronson attempted to farm, but his efforts failed to provide enough earnings. The family lived in poverty, so much so that Emerson would secretly leave money behind when he visited their cottage. The family subsisted on little more than sugar, bread, potatoes, apples, and squash.

7:28Still, Louisa later reflected, those conquered days were the happiest of my life. In the spring of 1842, Ronson traveled to England to visit a group of Transcendentalists who had founded a school based on his methods. He invited one of his English followers, a man named Charles Lane, to come live with his family. In September, Bronson, Lane, and Lane's son sailed back to Massachusetts. But after moving into the Alkut's tiny cottage, Lane quickly usurped power in the household. He forced Louisa and her sisters to take cold sunrise baths and study under his tutelage, and he treated their mother, Abba, like a servant.

8:04Bronson admired Lane's intellect so much that he was blind to his faults. As a result, the Alkut's marriage suffered. In November, Abba wrote in her journal, I am almost suffocated in this atmosphere of restriction and gloom. This is an invasion of my rights as a woman and a mother. Louisa, now ten years old, tried to escape Lane's tyranny by writing poetry and fantastical stories. The following summer, the Alkuts and Lanes packed their belongings in a horse-drawn carriage and moved twelve miles west to a run-down farmhouse in Harvard, Massachusetts. There, Lane and Alkut founded a utopian community they named Fruitlands.

8:41Lane advocated abstinence and banned private property, meat, and the use of animal labor. Roughly a dozen adults joined the community, crowding into a farmhouse that Abba compared to a pigsty. Louisa and her three sisters lived in an attic crawlspace surrounding the chimney. Bronson, Lane, and their followers spent long stretches of time away from the farm, visiting like-minded communities. And while Bronson focused on philosophy, the difficult work of running the farm fell to Abba and her daughters. After six miserable months, Abba reached a breaking point.

9:18Imagine it's a bitterly cold night in December 1843 in Harvard, Massachusetts. You, your husband Bronson, and your four daughters are gathered around the stove in the kitchen of Fruitlands, the farming commune where you've been living the past six months. You've just finished cleaning up a paltry dinner of bread and carrots. You've had growing doubts about this arrangement. You feel you can no longer stay silent. You take off your apron and slump into a chair. It's over, Bronson. Against my better judgment, I followed your lead. But I can't do this anymore. The girls and I are leaving. Bronson stares at you incredulously.

9:55Leaving? Where will you go? My brother helped me rent rooms three miles down the road in Still River. We'll pack up the furniture this week and be on our way. I don't understand. While you're searching for divinity and transcendence, who do you think is doing the cooking? The cleaning? Harvesting the crops? How could you blindside me like this? I don't know what you expected. You call this a new Eden? Look at your daughters. You point to your daughters, who are huddling for warmth by the fire. Their clothes are dirty and ragged. Your second eldest, Louisa, locks eyes with you. Her face is stricken with fear.

10:33Louisa's been sick for weeks. We barely have anything decent to eat. Is this really how you want to raise our children? I told you this would take time. I thought you shared my ideals. Yes. But while you've been focused on ideals, I've been focused on survival. The girls and I have been worked to the bone, trying to keep this place running. The soil here is no good. And do you realize how hard it is to do farm labor without any draft animals? But of course, Mr. Lane believes that using animal labor is immoral. We're trying to build something here. Things will get better. I can't leave and let the others down.

11:19If you stay, you'll be letting your family down. So will you join us? Or will you stay here with Mr. Lane? Bronson crumples in his seat and turns to face the wall. You feel certain he'll follow you if he wants to stay in the family. But from now on, you won't allow his pursuit of lofty ideals to cause your children to suffer.

11:43On December 10, 1843, Abba confronted Bronson, forcing him to choose between Fruitlands and their family. That night, 11-year-old Louisa wrote in her diary, In the eve, father and mother and Anna and I had a long talk. I was very unhappy, and we all cried. Anna and I cried in bed, and I prayed to God to keep us together. In January, Bronson relented and joined his wife and daughters when they abandoned Fruitlands for the nearby village of Still River. They spent the next several months recuperating from their ordeal. Later that year, the Alkuts returned to Concord. With help from Emerson and a family inheritance, the Alkuts purchased a homestead in Concord, which they named Hillside, and for the first time, Louisa had a room of her own.

12:28Louisa loved her father, but she witnessed his idealism fail her and her sisters. After leaving Fruitlands, Abba took charge of the family. As Louisa entered her teenage years in Hillside, she resisted pressures to conform to feminine ideals or prepare herself for marriage, unwilling to allow a husband to dictate her future. She wrote in her journal, It does me good to be alone. I've made a plan for my life, as I am in my teens, and no more a child. I'm old for my age and don't care much for girls' things. People think I'm wild and queer, but mother understands and helps me. Louisa inherited her mother's fiery temperament and strong work ethic, and the pair shared a close bond.

13:07Abba nurtured her daughter's ambitions, encouraging her to write. Louisa was the clear leader among her sisters. She was tall and dark haired, and she was adventurous, prone to climbing trees and taking dares. After she and her sister spent an afternoon tramping through the woods, ruining their clothes, Louisa wrote, We are dreadful wild people here in Concord. We do all the sinful things you can think of. But she was notorious for her bad temper. A friend remembered, when she got mad, she could be severe. When she wasn't outside, she spent her days writing poetry, wandering through Emerson's library, and acting out elaborate plays with her sisters.

13:44She dreamed of becoming a famous writer or actress. During this time, she was also exposed to abolitionism. In the 1840s, the national debate over slavery was intensifying, and thousands of enslaved people escaped bondage by fleeing to the north. Abba and Bronson were active in several anti-slavery societies, and they occasionally sheltered runaway slaves at Hillside. But Bronson was chronically unemployed, prioritizing his intellectual interests over making money. He spent his time renovating the property and cultivating flower and vegetable gardens. To pay for living expenses, Abba and her daughters taught and took in sewing, but they struggled with a lack of steady income.

14:23When some of Abba's Boston friends visited her, they were so shocked by her reduced circumstances that they arranged a job for her as a social worker in Boston. So in the fall of 1848, the Alkots rented out Hillside and moved back to Boston. While Bronson focused on his intellectual pursuits, Abba went to work caring for the influx of poor Irish immigrants entering the city. But her new job did little to alleviate her family's financial struggles. Louisa later wrote, We found ourselves in a small house in the south end with not a tree in sight. I was left to keep house, feeling like a caged seagull as I washed dishes and cooked.

14:59Louisa felt a strong sense of responsibility for her family's well-being, and she took on various jobs, including spending seven weeks as a house servant. The strain of city life weighed heavily on her. In May 1850, she wrote,

15:24The city also took a physical toll on the Alcots. Later that summer, the entire family came down with smallpox. They eventually recovered, but their finances continued to worsen. Once again, Louisa turned to writing as an escape. In September 1851, a woman's magazine published her poem entitled Sunlight. She was paid$5 in return. It was the first time 18-year-old Louisa made money as a writer. In 1852, the Alkuts were rescued from their misery when Nathaniel Hawthorne purchased Hillside from them. The money from the sale saved the family from financial ruin and even allowed them to move into a nicer home in Boston.

16:03Still, Louisa dreamed of earning enough money from writing to support her family. Starting in late 1852, she began writing pulp thrillers in her spare time, publishing them in magazines under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard. She called them Blood and Thunder Tales, declaring them easy to compose and better paid than moral and elaborate works. But she was desperate to write more serious work, and she hungered for wealth, fame, and recognition. In the spring of 1854, when she was 21 years old, she visited James T. Fields, a well-known and respected editor who had published Hawthorne's novel, The Scarlet Letter, four years earlier.

16:40Louisa showed him a memoir essay she had written about her time as a house servant. It was entitled, How I Went Out to Service. Fields rejected the piece outright, telling her, stick to your teaching, Miss Alcott. You can't write. She would remember those words for the rest of her life. Rather than discouraging her, however, Fields' harsh response lit a fire under her. She was determined to prove him wrong.

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19:13After publisher James T. Fields told Louisa May Alcott she could not write, she refused to give up. A few months later, in December of 1854, she managed to convince another publisher to bring out her first book, Flower Fables. It was a collection of stories about fairies, elves, and animals she had written when she was 16 to amuse Ralph Waldo Emerson's young daughter. 1 ,600 copies were published, and Alcott noted it sold very well. Still, she was frustrated to receive only$35 for her efforts. In 1855, the Alcotts moved to New Hampshire, but the now 22-year-old Louisa stayed behind in Boston to pursue her literary career.

19:52In New Hampshire, her younger sister Lizzie contracted scarlet fever from a poor family she was helping her mother care for. She suffered from a rash, fever, vomiting, and hair loss. She eventually recovered, but the illness left her permanently weak. In 1857, the Alcott family returned to Concord, where Emerson purchased a new home for them to live in, a two-story farmhouse named Orchard House. Bronson Alcott began renovating what he hoped would finally be a permanent residence for his nomadic family. But the next year brought major upheaval for Louisa and the Alcots. In January, Lizzie's lingering illness took a turn for the worse.

20:28A doctor told the family there was no hope of recovering. A wasting disease ravaged her body, making her look much older than her 22 years. Louisa often stayed by her sister's bedside during the night, keeping watch. But on March 14th, Lizzie finally succumbed to her illness and died. Louisa wrote, she is well at last. Three weeks later, her older sister Anna announced that she was engaged to a local farmer named John Pratt. Louisa wrote that she felt she was losing a second sister, confiding in her journal, Another sister is gone. I moaned in private over my great loss and said I'd never forgive John for taking Anna from me.

21:07And Louisa had no interest in sharing Anna's fate. She would later write, I'd rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe. But the twin losses of Lizzie and Anna overwhelmed her with feelings of loneliness and despair. Following her 26th birthday in November 1858, she reflected, These experiences have taken a deep hold and changed or developed me. I am learning that work of head and hand is my salvation when disappointment or wariness burden or darken my soul. That winter, she returned to Boston and took comfort in her work, resuming sewing, teaching, and submitting stories for publication.

21:43She felt a strong sense of duty to earn money for her family, writing, I seem to be the only breadwinner just now. Around this time, Bronson Alcott encouraged his daughter to submit a story to the prestigious magazine Atlantic Monthly. He personally delivered a manuscript of her short story, Love and Self-Love, to editor James Russell Lowell. It was a melodramatic love story featuring an orphaned teenage girl. Lowell accepted the story, though another year would pass before he published it. Feeling encouraged, Louisa began working on her first serious novel. Entitled Moods, it was a coming-of-age tale about an impetuous young woman who embarks on an ill-fated marriage.

22:22Throughout 1860, Louisa was so consumed with writing moods that she often forgot to eat or sleep. Still, she found time to earn money by churning out her blood-and-thunder stories under her pseudonym. While Louisa focused on her literary career, the nation was hurtling toward war. In July 1860, the Alkuts took in the family of John Brown, after the radical abolitionists had been executed for attempting to start a slave rebellion. When the Civil War broke out in April 1861, Louisa joined throngs of people in the streets of Boston waving goodbye to volunteer soldiers. She wrote, I long to be a man, but as I can't fight, I will content myself working for those who can.

23:02By the winter of 1862, the war had dragged on for longer than anyone imagined it would. Louisa was restless. Desperate to do more for the war effort, she applied to work as a nurse at a Union Army hospital in Washington, D.C. She traveled south in December 1862, just as the Union Army was waging an ill-fated assault on well-entrenched Confederate forces in Fredericksburg, Virginia. The battle ended in a crushing Union defeat and heavy casualties on both sides. Just as she began work in Washington, 45 miles north of Fredericksburg, hundreds of wounded and dying Union soldiers were arriving from the battlefield.

23:43Imagine it's early in the morning on December 16, 1862, in Washington, D.C. You're in a hotel-turned-Union Army hospital, and today marks your first full day as a volunteer Army nurse. You're in a large, dimly lit ward, pouring water for the injured men who lie asleep in a row of narrow beds. As you turn and open a window to ventilate the room, you feel a rush of excitement for the adventure you're starting. As you look outside to the dusty street, you see a mass of horse-drawn carts. You briefly wonder if they're setting up a food market, but then your stomach lurches as you realize the carts are carrying more injured soldiers.