There were Bab and Betty and most of a dozen of their worn-down dolls, and no matter how worn-down or creepy this place might seem to you and I, for these girls and their dolls, it was the most wonderful place for a party any of them could imagine. Then that monstrous dog had stolen all the food, and by the time they chased it down, it'd eaten the last crumbs! They followed the dog back into the decrepit barn, and that was how they met its master, a circus run-away, Ben Brown. Ben turned out to be a horse master. . . .
Author Biography
Louisa May Alcott (1832 - 1888) was an American novelist and poet best known as the author of the novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886). Raised by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott in New England, she also grew up among many of the well-known intellectuals of the day such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. Alcott's family suffered financial difficulties, and while she worked to help support the family from an early age, she also sought an outlet in writing. She began to receive critical success for her writing in the 1860s. Early in her career, she sometimes used the pen name A. M. Barnard, under which she wrote novels for young adults. Published in 1868, Little Women is set in the Alcott family home, Hillside, later called the Wayside, in Concord, Massachusetts and is loosely based on Alcott's childhood experiences with her three sisters. The novel was very well received and is still a popular children's novel today, filmed several times. Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist and remained unmarried throughout her life. She died in Boston on March 6, 1888.
