Louisa May Alcottās lively and heartwarming stories are favorites with young readers everywhere. A Garland for Girls will be especially welcomed by those who read and treasure all of the famous books by this great American author.
Using real life boys and girls as the characters in her fascinating chronicles, Miss Alcott has written a series of delightful stories, filled with sunshine and encouragement. Her interesting plots, surprise endings, and understanding of people make fascinating reading from cover to cover.
Rich girls, poor girls, haughty girls, timid girls, clever girls, and silly girlsāall the sorts of girls who make a worldāfloat through these pages, and before you have finished you will feel that you have known each one, almost as well as your own best friends.
Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1832, the second of four daughters of Abigail May Alcott and Bronson Alcott, the prominent Transcendentalist thinker and social reformer. Raised in Concord, Massachusetts, and educated by her father, Alcott early on came under the influence of the great men of his circle: Emerson, Hawthorne, the preacher Theodore Parker, and Thoreau. From her youth, Louisa worked at various tasks to help support her family: sewing, teaching, domestic service, and writing. In 1862, she volunteered to serve as an army nurse in a Union hospital during the Civil Warā an experience that provided her material for her first successful book, Hospital Sketches (1863). Between 1863 and 1869, she published several anonymous and pseudonymous Gothic romances and lurid thrillers. But fame came with the publication of her Little Women (1868ā 69), a novel based on the childhood adventures of the four Alcott sisters, which received immense popular acclaim and brought her financial security as well as the conviction to continue her career as a writer. In the wake of Little Womenās popularity, she brought out An Old- Fashioned Girl (1870), Little Men(1871), Eight Cousins (1875), Rose in Bloom (1876), Joās Boys (1886), and other books for children, as well as two adult novels, Moods (1864) and Work (1873). An active participant in the womenās suffrage and temperance movements during the last decade of her life, Alcott died in Boston in 1888, on the day her father was buried.
C. M. HĆ©bert is an Earphones Award winner and Audie Award nominee. She is the recording studio director for the Talking Books Program at the Library of Congressā National Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with her husband, daughter, cat, and assorted fish.