Louisa May Alcott was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet. She is best known as the author of the novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886).

Raised in New England by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott, she grew up among many well-known scholars of the day, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

The Little Women is a coming of the age novel. The story attends the lives of the four March sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy—and details their path from childhood to womanhood.

Loosely based on the lives of the author and her three sisters, it is classified as an autobiographical or semi-autobiographical novel.

The novel has addressed three major themes: domesticity, work, and true love, all of them interconnected and each crucial to the accomplishment of its heroine's identity.

In addition to her childhood and that of her sisters, scholars who have assessed the diaries of Louisa Alcott's mother, Abigail Alcott, have inferred that Little Women was also heavily inspired by Abigail Alcott's own early life.

Originally, however, Alcott did not want to publish Little Women, contending she found it boring and wasn't sure how to write girls as she knew few beyond her sisters. However, motivated by her editor Thomas Niles, she wrote it within 10 weeks.