Louisa May Alcott

Alcott's father, the transcendentalist Bronson Alcott, kept the family in near-constant poverty through failed ventures including Fruitlands, a short-lived utopian commune; Louisa worked from her teens as a teacher, seamstress, and domestic servant to help support her parents and three sisters. She served briefly as a Civil War nurse in Washington, contracting typhoid and receiving mercury-based treatment that likely caused the chronic illness that plagued her for the rest of her life.

Before Little Women she supported the family writing lurid pulp thrillers under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard, work she kept hidden for decades. Little Women, published in two parts starting in 1868, drew directly on her own girlhood among her sisters and her father's Concord circle of Emerson and Thoreau, and made her wealthy and famous almost overnight.

She never married, continued writing sequels and other novels to support her family, and died in Boston in 1888, two days after her father's death.