50 Fun Facts About Louisa May Alcott

Which US president of the early 1900s said that he worshiped the books of Louisa May Alcott?

Theodore Roosevelt counted himself a devoted reader, and he had company: Simone de Beauvoir and Ursula K. Le Guin also drew inspiration from her books.

Which disease ended Louisa May Alcott's work as a Civil War army nurse after only six weeks?

Typhoid fever left her critically ill partway through a planned three months, and her father had to travel south and take her home to Concord.

Louisa May Alcott was the first woman in Concord, Massachusetts, to do what in an 1879 school board election?

Register to vote is what she did first, and then she urged the other women of Concord to follow her, only to be disappointed when few did.

Which March sister in Little Women tours Europe with her aunt and comes home married to Laurie?

Amy is chosen for the trip that Jo had hoped to make, and Laurie, still stung by Jo's refusal, slowly falls in love with her abroad.

By what pet name do the four March sisters call their mother, a character Louisa May Alcott based on her own?

Marmee was modelled on Abigail Alcott, who held the household together while her husband, a philosopher, often failed to bring in an income.

Who wrote and directed the 2019 film of Little Women, with Saoirse Ronan as Jo March?

Greta Gerwig built her screenplay from Alcott's own letters and diaries as well as the novel, and began writing it on a trip to Big Sur.

Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women after her publisher, Thomas Niles, asked her to write what?

A book for girls was not her own idea, and she hesitated over it because she felt she knew more about boys.

In which state was Louisa May Alcott born, in a town called Germantown?

Pennsylvania was home only briefly: the family left for Boston in 1834, when Louisa was still a toddler.

In Little Women, what does old Mr. Laurence give Beth March, who reminds him of his late granddaughter?

A piano that had belonged to the girl herself goes to Beth, one sign of the special, tender friendship the old man forms with her.

Which naturalist and family friend taught the young Louisa May Alcott biology and Native American history?

Henry David Thoreau was a source of girlhood romantic fantasies as well as lessons, and she later wrote a poem titled Thoreau's Flute.

Under which pen name did Louisa May Alcott publish lurid thrillers for adults during the 1860s?

A. M. Barnard kept the secret well: her gothic thrillers went undiscovered until the 1940s and were not collected in books until the 1970s.

Which writer paid the Alcott family's rent in Concord and gave young Louisa May Alcott open access to his library?

Ralph Waldo Emerson had talked her father into moving the family to Concord in the first place, and he went on to mentor Louisa in literature.

Which novelist bought the Alcott family's Concord home, Hillside, in 1852 and renamed it The Wayside?

Nathaniel Hawthorne paid $1,500 for it and chose the new name because the house stood so close to the road that it could be mistaken for a coach stop.

Louisa May Alcott's parents, Bronson and Abigail, belonged to which New England philosophical movement?

Transcendentalism shaped her earliest lessons: her father taught her the alphabet by forming the shapes of the letters with his own body.

In Little Women, what post does the March sisters' father hold in the Union Army during the Civil War?

Chaplain is the post he takes after losing all his money, which leaves his wife and four daughters at home in genteel poverty.

Which penniless professor does Jo March marry in Little Women after refusing her wealthy neighbour Laurie?

Fritz Bhaer, in full Friedrich, is a middle-aged German immigrant, and the couple go on to raise his two orphaned nephews beside two sons of their own.

On which holiday does the March sisters' father come home from the war in Little Women, a year after it opens?

Christmas Day brings him back to where the novel began: it opens with his wife and daughters facing the same holiday without him.

Which actress earned an Oscar nomination for playing Jo March in the 1994 film of Little Women?

Winona Ryder was the reason the film was made at all: Columbia agreed to consider the project only on condition that she played Jo.

Which abolitionist, executed in 1859, did Louisa May Alcott describe at the time as a saint?

John Brown was, in her words, Saint John the Just, and she later marked his death with a poem about a rose that bloomed on the day.

In which Concord home, now a museum, did Louisa May Alcott write Little Women at a desk built by her father?

Orchard House took its name from the apple orchard on the land, and it was the most permanent home the wandering Alcotts ever had.

Which 1863 book did Louisa May Alcott build from the letters she sent home during the Civil War?

Hospital Sketches gave its narrator the comic name Tribulation Periwinkle, though the scenes stay virtually true to what Alcott herself saw.

In which city did Louisa May Alcott spend her six weeks of Civil War service in the winter of 1862?

Washington's Georgetown district housed the makeshift wards, where she found overcrowded, filthy quarters, bad food and poor ventilation.

Which utopian farm commune did Louisa May Alcott's father co-found in 1843, only for it to collapse within months?

Fruitlands refused to use animal labour on the farm, a rule that helped to undo it while many of the men spent their days philosophising.

Louisa May Alcott is buried on a hillside called Authors' Ridge in which Concord cemetery?

Sleepy Hollow became her resting place in March 1888, after she died just two days after her own father.

Under which title was the second part of Little Women, about the sisters' adult lives, published in Britain?

Good Wives was a name chosen by the publisher rather than by Alcott, and British editions still sell it as a separate book.

Which estate does Jo March inherit from her Aunt March in Little Women and turn into a school for boys?

Plumfield becomes the setting of the sequel Little Men, in which Jo and her husband educate a houseful of children there.

Which religious classic do the March sisters keep citing in Little Women, comparing their trials to its journey?

The Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan's allegory, even supplies several of the novel's chapter titles, which name its characters and places.

In Little Women, which treat does the youngest March sister bring to school, earning a punishment from her teacher?

Pickled limes cost her a strike on the palm and a spell standing on a platform in front of the whole class.

In Little Women, Meg March marries John Brooke, who is employed by the wealthy Laurence family as what?

Tutor to young Laurie, who is being readied for college, is the job that brings him into the Marches' lives and into Meg's heart.

Louisa May Alcott blamed her years of poor health on poisoning by which substance, in a drug she was given in 1863?

Mercury was in calomel, the medicine she was dosed with as an army nurse, though two modern doctors have suggested that she had lupus.

Which fairy-tale collection, first told to a friend's daughter, was Louisa May Alcott's first book in 1854?

Flower Fables earned her only about $35 from its Boston publisher, even though she believed it had sold very well.

Which novel did Louisa May Alcott write as a teenager in 1849, though it stayed unpublished until 1997?

The Inheritance was her first novel, and a film version arrived in the same year that the book at last reached print.

Which Louisa May Alcott thriller, rejected in 1866 as too sensational, became a best-seller on publication in 1995?

A Long Fatal Love Chase was laid aside after a second rejection, and the manuscript was later bought and restored before Random House released it.

Which Louisa May Alcott thriller follows Jean Muir, a governess scheming to win the fortune of the Coventry family?

Behind a Mask lets its schemer win: Jean Muir, secretly an actress of thirty, marries into the family and becomes Lady Coventry.

Which Louisa May Alcott novel follows Polly Milton, a country teenager visiting the wealthy Shaws in Boston?

An Old-Fashioned Girl has Polly's plain ways win over the fashionable Shaws, and it reached the screen as a musical film in 1949.

Which 1875 Louisa May Alcott novel follows the orphaned heiress Rose Campbell and her guardian, Uncle Alec?

Eight Cousins counts Rose herself along with the seven boy cousins, known as the clan, whom she at first tries hard to avoid.

In Louisa May Alcott's Under the Lilacs, what has young Ben Brown run away from with his dog, Sancho?

A circus had employed Ben as a horse master, and he fled after his father left and the circus master began to mistreat him.

Which 1886 novel, seven years in the writing, was the last of Louisa May Alcott's books about the March family?

Jo's Boys stalled when her sister May died in 1879, and she took it up again only after a magazine editor asked her for a new serial.

Louisa May Alcott raised her late sister May's daughter, who was known by which nickname?

Lulu, named Louisa after her aunt, came into her care from Europe as a baby in 1880, and Alcott wrote the Lulu's Library stories for her.

Louisa May Alcott's painter sister May, model for the youngest March girl, exhibited at which city's Salon in 1877?

Paris accepted her still life for the 1877 Salon, the same year its jury turned down both paintings sent in by Mary Cassatt.

Which actress played Jo March for director George Cukor in the 1933 film of Little Women, the first with sound?

Katharine Hepburn had made her film debut for Cukor the year before, and the picture went on to break box-office records at Radio City Music Hall.

Which star played the vain, artistic March sister opposite June Allyson's Jo in the 1949 film of Little Women?

Elizabeth Taylor was still a teenager, yet the film makes her character several years older than Beth, reversing the sisters' ages in the book.

The 2019 film of Little Women earned six Academy Award nominations but won in which single category?

Best Costume Design rewarded Jacqueline Durran, who mixed a free sartorial spirit with traditional Victorian stiffness in dressing the characters.

Which country was home to the revolutionary Louisa May Alcott befriended in Switzerland, a model for Laurie?

Poland's Ladislas Wisniewski traded language lessons with her at Vevey, and she later named him as one of her models for Laurie.

Which fabric did members wear at the commune of Louisa May Alcott's girlhood, where cotton and wool were both banned?

Linen was all that was left: cotton was out because slave labor produced it, and wool because it was taken from sheep.

Which English novelist, whose life story Louisa May Alcott read in 1857, was the model for Alcott's early fiction?

Charlotte Brontë reached her through Elizabeth Gaskell's biography, which Alcott read while her own sister Elizabeth lay gravely ill.

Which German writer did Louisa May Alcott call her chief idol, an inspiration for Jo March's professor husband?

Goethe held that place from the day she was handed a copy of his novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.

Eden's Outcasts, John Matteson's joint biography of Louisa May Alcott and her father, won which award in 2008?

Pulitzer Prize judges chose it for biography, and Matteson, an English professor, credited his own daughter with helping him understand the Alcotts.

Which children's magazine did Louisa May Alcott edit to pay off family debts, shortly before writing Little Women?

Merry's Museum paid her a salary of $500 a year, though she disliked the editing work itself.

Which sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial statue had early art lessons from Louisa May Alcott's sister May?

Daniel Chester French was a young Concord neighbour of the Alcotts, and May influenced his decision to take up sculpture.