Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) is best known for her 1868 novel Little Women , a sentimental story about the four March sisters and their mother during the Civil War. The daughter of transcendentalist Bronson Alcott, Louisa spent some of her childhood playing in Ralph Waldo Emerson's study and walking in the woods around Concord, Massachusetts, with Henry David Thoreau. The influence of transcendentalism is apparent in much of her writing. In 1843 the Alcott family lived in an experimental utopian community founded by Bronson and Englishman Charles Lane called Fruitlands, but it failed within the year. Louisa's satirical short story Transcendental Wild Oats (1873) memorializes her brief yet formative time at Fruitlands. The Alcott family remained poor during Louisa's childhood and early adulthood, largely due to her father's inability to provide a steady income from his philosophical lecturing tours. Alcott, her mother, and her three sisters made money through the limited means…