Little Women

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Though I have never been able to choose a "favorite book," I have always known that if I had to be stuck on a desert island -- with only one book to bring with me -- it would be this one: Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott. Each time I read it, I discover something new and wonderful while simultaneously communing with the familiar and beloved. -Ilana Masad ; NPR Little Women is a novel by American author Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), which was originally published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869. Following the lives of the four March sisters--Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy--the novel details their passage from childhood to womanhood and is loosely based on the author and her three sisters. Scholars classify Little Women as an autobiographical or semi-autobiographical novel. Little Women has been read as a romance or as a quest, or both. It has been read as a family drama that validates virtue over wealth, but also as a means of escaping that life by women who knew its gender constraints only too well. Alcott created a new form of literature, one that took elements from Romantic children's fiction and combined it with others from sentimental novels, resulting in a totally new format. Within Little Women can be found the first vision of the "All-American girl" and that her various aspects are embodied in the differing March sisters. A True Classic that Belongs on Every Bookshelf