Tip Sheet

Did you know that Louisa May Alcott…

*Wrote pulp fiction anonymously and under pseudonyms – a secret kept for a half-century after her death? (Some 30 have been found…. So far… others are still missing.)

*Invented characters who were transvestites, spies, murderers, revolutionaries, drug addicts, and/or incestuous?

*Smoked hashish and took opium?

*Ran every day?

*Was raised a vegetarian and grew up on a commune?

*Had a schoolteacher father who invented recess and had an integrated classroom a quarter-century before the abolition of slavery?

*Grew up on a stop of the Underground Railroad, harboring fugitive slaves?

*Was home-schooled in literature by Ralph Waldo Emerson?

*Accompanied Henry David Thoreau on his famous nature walks?

*Lived next door to Nathaniel Hawthorne? Knew Henry, William, Alice and the rest of the famed James family from childhood?

*Knew Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, William Lloyd Garrison, and every leader of the antislavery movement? Her family hosted John Brown’s widow and boarded his daughter after his execution.

*Had teenage crushes on Emerson and Thoreau, and in her favorite book (Moods), her heroine is married to a character based on one and in love with the other?

*Was a nurse in the Civil War assisting in assembly-line amputations with no medical training? (She wanted to be a soldier but couldn’t.)

*Was a descendant of Samuel Sewall, the only judge of the Salem Witch Trials who repented, and then wrote the earliest known anti-slavery tract?

* That her great-aunt was married to John Hancock?

*Wrote and published groundbreaking stories about interracial marriage, slave revolt, and race relations?

*Grew up in grueling poverty and worked as a seamstress, a laundress, a governess, and a teacher and a domestic servant?
*As a child of eleven saw her parents’ marriage nearly break up over her father’s tie to another man – and wrote about it at the time?

*Was a professional-level actress-comedienne and may have worked as one under a different name?

*Wrote more than 200 works – stories, poems, fiction, non-fiction, plays, articles, not to mention journals and letters. None of her books sold fewer than 10,000 copies.

*Didn’t like writing for children – called it “moral pap for the young” and did it for the money?

*Wrote Little Women in ten weeks? Wrote the sequel a few months later just as quickly?

*Supported equal rights for women, and organized women to vote forty years before the 19th amendment was passed – and was the first to cast her ballot in an official election?

*Wrote her way from rags to riches and died a multi-millionaire? (the 19th century equivalent)

*Was probably manic-depressive and seriously considered suicide?

*Lived in thirty different places before she was 25 years old?

*Never married and is believed by many to have been gay?

*Preferred younger or much older men ?

*Her writing has been translated into over 50 languages?

*None of her 8 books for young adults has ever been out of print?

*Is the only woman in the card game “authors”?