Little Men
What's Little Men About
Little Men (1871) continues Louisa May Alcott’s story of the March family. It picks up from Little Women and Good Wives to follow tomboy Jo into her married life. Jo and her husband, Prof. Bhaer, have opened a school for boys. Jo takes charge, but she retains a “merry sort of face,” and the boys call her jolly. The school takes in troubled cases including homeless “little chap,” Nat, and rowdy run-away Dan. Alcott pictures the kind of boyhood that the recent bestseller, The Dangerous Book for Boys, hopes to rekindle. Alcott’s boys climb trees and sneak off to light their first (choke!) cigars, but each lad has the makings of a good man – qualities that Jo intends to bring out. The language might sound as quaint as “thunder turtles!” and “hoydens” (grrrls), but the drama is the same now as always. Jo’s concern for her boys is every teacher’s – every right parent’s – hope for every child. The story concludes with Jo’s Boys: And How They Turned Out.
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The Creative Behind the Book
Louisa May Alcott, born in 1832, was the second child of Bronson Alcott of Concord, Massachusetts, a self-taught philosopher, school reformer, and utopian who was much too immersed in the world of ideas to ever succeed in supporting his family. That task fell to his wife and later to his enterprising daughter Louisa May. While her father lectured, wrote, and conversed with such famous friends as Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau, Louisa taught school, worked as a seamstress and nurse, took in laundry, and even hired herself out as a domestic servant at age nineteen. The small sums she earned often kept the family from complete destitution, but it was through her writing that she finally brought them financial independence. “I will make a battering-ram of my head,” she wrote in her journal, “and make a way through this rough-and-tumble world.”
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