Louisa May Alcott

Alcott grew up poor in a household run on her father's philosophy rather than his earnings, and she supported it from the age of fifteen — sewing, teaching, domestic service, and finally writing. Her early money came from lurid thrillers published under a pen name, work she enjoyed far more than the book that made her famous. When a publisher asked for a story for girls, she thought the idea dull and wrote it anyway, at speed, because the family needed the income.

Little Women sold out its first printing in weeks and never went out of print. It bought the house, paid her father's debts and made her, for the rest of her life, a woman whose front gate was watched by admirers she had not invited. She served as a Union army nurse in 1862 until typhoid nearly killed her; the mercury in the treatment probably shortened her life. She died two days after her father, at fifty-five, and was buried on the ridge in Concord where Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau also lie — a row of graves that has drawn visitors for well over a century.