Louisa May Alcott

Alcott's father was a transcendentalist educator whose utopian farm collapsed in 1844 and left his wife and four daughters destitute. She went to work early — as a seamstress, a domestic servant, a governess and a teacher — and she wrote, at first, anything that paid: lurid tales of revenge and disguise published under the name A. M. Barnard, which she never publicly claimed and which were rediscovered only in the 1940s.

In late 1862 she went to Washington as a volunteer army nurse. Six weeks later she had typhoid, was treated with calomel — a mercury compound — and came home permanently damaged; the ill health that dogged the rest of her life is generally read as mercury poisoning. The letters she wrote from the ward became Hospital Sketches, her first real success.

Little Women was written in ten weeks, in 1868, because a publisher asked for a book for girls and she did not much want to write one. It made her family solvent for the first time in their lives and turned her into a figure she was uncomfortable being. She never married, supported her parents and her orphaned niece, and died in 1888, two days after her father.