Jo's Boys and How They Turned Out: A Sequel to Little Men

Louisa May Alcott

Jan 2010 · Cosimo, Inc.

About this ebook

Taking place ten years after Little Men, Jo's Boys and How They Turned Out, by Louisa May Alcott, is the third and final book in the Little Women trilogy. Originally published in 1886, two years before Ms. Alcott's death, Jo's Boys follows the lives of the young men readers came to love and cherish in its prequel. In it, we learn the fates of Jo's sons Rob and Teddy, along with the other boys at Plumfield Estate School. Written in classic Alcott style, we see how the boys struggle to overcome their many flaws, in the end learning life's lessons the hard way. Just as the March girls did, each boy must learn to deal with death, love, heartbreak, and the consequences of their actions. Readers will feel pain and joy along side each young man as he completes his life journey and fulfills his dreams in this classic conclusion to one of America's most beloved series. LOUISA MAY ALCOTT (1832-1888), one of the most well-known American novelists of the 19th century, was born on November 29, 1832 to transcendentalist educator Amos Bronson Alcott and his wife, Abigail May Alcott. She was the second of four sisters (like Jo, her literary corollary), and grew up in a family that encouraged and sympathized with her abolitionist and feminist leanings. As a child she received instruction from noted literary figures such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, all family friends. In addition to the Little Women series, which included four novels, she wrote 28 other works, three under the pen name A.M Barnard. Though Alcott had chronic health problems in her later years, most likely attributed to an autoimmune disease, she continued to write until her death at 55 in 1888.

About the author

Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1832. Two years later, she moved with her family to Boston and in 1840 to Concord, which was to remain her family home for the rest of her life. Her father, Bronson Alcott, was a transcendentalist and friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Alcott early realized that her father could not be counted on as sole support of his family, and so she sacrificed much of her own pleasure to earn money by sewing, teaching, and churning out potboilers. Her reputation was established with Hospital Sketches (1863), which was an account of her work as a volunteer nurse in Washington, D.C. Alcott's first works were written for children, including her best-known Little Women (1868--69) and Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo's Boys (1871). Moods (1864), a "passionate conflict," was written for adults. Alcott's writing eventually became the family's main source of income. Throughout her life, Alcott continued to produce highly popular and idealistic literature for children. An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Eight Cousins (1875), Rose in Bloom (1876), Under the Lilacs (1878), and Jack and Jill (1881) enjoyed wide popularity. At the same time, her adult fiction, such as the autobiographical novel Work: A Story of Experience (1873) and A Modern Mephistopheles (1877), a story based on the Faust legend, shows her deeper concern with such social issues as education, prison reform, and women's suffrage. She realistically depicts the problems of adolescents and working women, the difficulties of relationships between men and women, and the values of the single woman's life.