Louisa May Alcott was an American author best known for the classic Little Women (1868). She initially wrote under the androgynous pseudonym A.M. Barnard, which was discovered in 2008 by a Harvard researcher.

Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania. The majority of her early education was under the direction of her father in the company of family friends such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Theodore Parker. After her childhood, she spent the majority of her life in Concord and Boston. She worked various jobs to support her family such as domestic servitude and teaching. During the Civil War, she worked in Washington, D.C. as a nurse in a Union hospital.

Unbeknown to most, Alcott began her writing career in 1851 under the pen name Flora Fairfield. Under this pseudonym, she published poems, thrillers, juvenile tales, and short stories. She began to use the name A.M. Barnard in 1862, under which she wrote plays which were to be produced and performed in Boston. She did not begin writing under her real name until 1865 when she became an editor for Merry’s Museum, a girl’s magazine.

In 1868, she published Little Women, undoubtedly her most well known work. The success of this novel gave her the financial stability to continue a full-time career as an author. She wrote several more novels over the course of her life, many of which centered around the characters of Little Women and were loosely based on her own life. These novels include Little Men (1871), Eight Cousins (1875) and Jo's Boys (1886).