Louisa May Alcott (1832–88) was the second of four daughters of Amos Bronson Alcott, the Boston transcendentalist whose social circle included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Alcott herself turned to the practical aspects of life and living after a utopian commune her father founded collapsed. She published stories and articles, often under the male pen-name A. M. Barnard, as well as a collection of her letters from her time as a Civil War nurse, before the best-selling classic Little Women (1868), a semi-autobiographical novel, established Alcott as one of America’s most successful novelists.