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    Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography
    Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography
    Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography
    Audiobook9 hours

    Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography

    Written by Susan Cheever

    Narrated by Tavia Gilbert

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Apart from her bestselling Home Before Dark, a biography of her father, John Cheever, and My Name Is Bill, her penetrating portrait of the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Susan Cheever's most recent and major success, American Bloomsbury, was a hugely popular nonfiction narrative of the writers and artists (including Emerson, Thoreau, and the Alcott family) of Concord, Massachusetts. With more than 35,000 copies of the book sold since, Cheever has focused on the legendary and much-loved Louisa May Alcott.

    Every year, new young readers continue to fall in love with Alcott's work, from Little Women to her feminist papers. Based on extensive research and access to Alcott's journals and correspondence, Cheever chronicles all aspects of Alcott's life, beginning with the fateful meeting of her parents to her death, just two days after that of her dynamic and domineering father, Bronson. Cheever examines Alcott's role as a woman, a working writer, and a daughter at a time when Alcott's rejection of marriage in favor of independence-a decision to be no man's "little woman"-was seen as defying conventional wisdom.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateNov 2, 2010
    ISBN9781400187904
    Author

    Susan Cheever

    Susan Cheever is the bestselling author of thirteen previous books, including five novels and the memoirs Note Found in a Bottle and Home Before Dark. Her work has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Boston Globe Winship Medal. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the Corporation of Yaddo, and a member of the Author's Guild Council. She teaches in the Bennington College M.F.A. program. She lives in New York City with her family.

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    Reviews for Louisa May Alcott

    3.5/5

    52 ratings9 reviews

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    • 3/5
      An interesting history of the famous author's life. I actually found this book far more interesting than Little Women. Ms. Alcott's life was an complex series of contradictions. She was a life-long slave to her familial duties and a very selfless and generous woman. She contributed much to many worthwhile causes and lived to see her work receive wide acclaim.
    • 5/5
      I highly recommend this book if you are curious about the author of Little Women. Alcott was an extraordinary woman. Her father, Branson Alcott, was part of the transcendalism movement in that mid 19th century. She was taught by Henry David Thoreau.
    • 4/5
      Because Cheever is a writer, she brings a writer's sensibility to this biography, and is very clear about her own conclusions and research, and what she thinks about the writing life. As a result, this is an informal, very readable biography with fascinating asides about writing (vs. Writing, or WRITING). I loved it.
    • 4/5
      A little tedious at times, but it sets straight a lot of the story about the author of one of my fav books - like the brownstone in NYC on MacDougal St, the one that has a plaque stating that LMA wrote some of Little Women there; she was never there and had not yet even been to NYC - so there NYU! LMA's life was harsh and yet her circle of family friends included Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James and other luminaries...this book gives great insight into LMA's writing, especially the book she did NOT want to write.
    • 1/5
      1 - both my library and nearest Half Price Books have this under "Alcott" in the fiction section. It's by Cheever and non-fiction.

      2 - There are a lot of really irrelevant to Alcott but not the times historical facts in here that are definitely geared towards a reader who didn't pay attention in US History at all. It's a little patronizing sometimes and not gracefully done, they're all rather clunkily inserted.

      3 - The author makes a lot of parallels between her and Alcott's life and in a way that seems to grab for attention.

      4 - There are some other, historical parallels in here that detract and distract from the point.

      5 - Cheever will go on about a historical tidbit, leave you wondering why it's there and then you connect it awhile later and feel like the flow of things got badly dropped.

      Forced myself to finish this.
    • 4/5
      Not the most earth-shaking biography, but a clear, insightful look into the Alcott family and Louisa's role in it. I wish she'd put in a little less "Louisa lives out the truths of all of womankind" editorializing, but I understand the temptation to do so. Also, on the heels of too many 700-page biographies, this one was mercifully short.
    • 3/5
      Susan Cheever has written an engaging biography of Louisa May Alcott. This book is deeply personal, beginning with a preface that details Cheever's own fascination with the author of "Little Women," a work that has inspired generations of women, including budding writers like Susan Sontag and Cheever herself. The book's main character, Jo March, is one of the few writer/heroines depicted before the age of feminist fiction.Louisa May Alcott thrived under a demanding father who believed in progressive education. She did well, too, under the guidance of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson when, in 1840, her impecunious father accepted Emerson's offer of a rent-free cottage in Concord, Mass., then the center of the American literary universe.There is nothing new in Cheever's biography -- after all, Alcott is a much-studied author and biographical subject -- but the narrative is reprised with passion and insight, and with the experience of a writer who grew up as the daughter of a famous American writer, John Cheever. If you know the daughter's work, then you'll know the following sentence describing daughter and father applies equally to both biographer and subject: "All through her life, Louisa's father was prodding and bullying, commanding and occasionally rescuing, letting Louisa know what was wrong with her and telling her what to do."Yet this same affinity for Alcott and for the writer's life leads Cheever to distrust her own biographical impulses. She notes her father always denied the autobiographical implications of his work, preferring to call it "a self-contained dream." It is as if her father is standing over her when she adds, "Have we gone too far in trying to bring great works of the imagination down to the detective work we have done on the lives of great writers? Are we robbing ourselves of the knockout experience of reading a great work of literature as if it were a given and not the creation of just another struggling human being?"Such angst, however, presents a false dilemma. Would Shakespeare's plays, for example, really be lessened if a cache of his letters were suddenly discovered? Doesn't biography, in fact, enforce the greatness of literature rather than diminish it?Cheever raises questions about biography as if to safeguard herself from attack, but then makes no attempt to answer them. Why? She mentions that Alcott never had a hard word to say about her father in spite of his harsh treatment of her. Isn't Cheever practicing the same silence in this book by not confronting her father, by not affirming the very book she has produced in spite of his objections?
    • 3/5
      This biography of Louisa May Alcott was absorbing and sometimes newly insightful. Cheever is good at putting events in context and letting the context illuminate the events (eg, her excellent chapters on the effects of the Civil War). I welcomed the parts of the book where she stepped out of her biographer's role and discussed what Alcott's work and life meant to her personally.But this book is marred by editorial sloppiness. At one point, the third of the four Alcott daughters, Lizzie, is identified not once but twice in the same paragraph as the youngest daughter. (As anyone familiar with LITTLE WOMEN knows, the youngest daughter is Amy.) There are obvious errors in punctuation (not matters of opinion or style). T
    • 5/5
      Recommended to all life-time readers, especially women who adopted Jo as a role model even though wemay not have known it. Her influence has been more lasting than the more "glamorous" Nancy Drew.Cheever does an outstanding job.