Little Men

About J.T. BarbareseLouisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown Pennsylvania in 1832 and grew up in Concord Massachusetts. She was the second of four daughters of Abba May and Bronson Alcott a prominent transcendentalist thinker and social reformer whose idealistic preoccupations caused him to neglect his familys practical needs. Louisa began to shoulder her familys financial burdens at a young ageas a domestic as a teacher and as a writer producing everything from sketches of her Civil War nursing experiences to pseudonymous lurid thrillers. Fame and fortune came with the publication of Little Women in 1868-1869 a novel based upon her childhood experiences. This was followed by other books in the Little Women Series all of them enormously popular: An Old-Fashioned Girl in 1870 Little Men in 1871 Eight Cousins in 1875 its sequel Rose in Bloom in 1876 Under the Lilacs in 1878 Jack and Jill in 1880 and finally in 1886 Jos Boys the sequel to Little Men. Among her other books was the autobiographical novel Work: A Story of Experience in 1873. She was active in the womens suffrage and temperance movements until her death in 1888.John Matteson holds doctoral degrees from Harvard and Columbia Universities. He is a professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and is deputy director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography. Matteson is the author of The Lives of Margaret Fuller and Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father. For the latter book he was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.J. T. Barbarese is the author of three books of poems including A Very Small World and a translation of Euripedes The Children of Heracles. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly Boulevard The Georgia Review The Denver Quarterly The Cortland Review and Poetry and his literary journalism in numerous publications from The Journal of Modern Literature to the New York Times. He is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Rutgers University where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in poetry fiction playwriting Romanticism and childrens literature.