LITTLE MEN

Little Men, by Louisa May Alcott, is the second book in the Little Women trilogy. Also titled Life at Plumfield with Jo's Boys, the book follows Jo Bhaer and her husband Professor Bhaer as they run the Plumfield Estate School, taking under their wing young boys and girls in need of instruction and love. As in Little Women, each student has his or her own faults that make it all the more difficult to mature into proper young ladies and gentlemen. And, as in Little Women, the children must confront those difficulties and fears head-on before truly learning their lesson.

In 1868, Alcott's Little Women launched the success of the March family saga along with the success of Alcott the writer, which lives on into our own time. Little Men focuses on Jo and her family, likely because Alcott modeled Jo after herself and always felt closest to the character. Readers fell in love with the most outgoing March sister as well, and their devotion continued through the exploits of her sons and students in the final two books in this captivating trilogy.

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.