Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist and poet best known as the author of the novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886). Raised by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott in New England, she also grew up among many of the well-known intellectuals of the day such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau.

Alcott's family suffered financial difficulties, and while she worked to help support the family from an early age, she also sought an outlet in writing. She began to receive critical success for her writing in the 1860s. Early in her career, she sometimes used the pen name A. M. Barnard, under which she wrote novels for young adults.

Published in 1868, Little Women is set in the Alcott family home, Hillside, later called the Wayside, in Concord, Massachusetts and is loosely based on Alcott's childhood experiences with her three sisters. The novel was very well received and is still a popular children's novel today, filmed several times.

Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist and remained unmarried throughout her life. She died in Boston on March 6, 1888.

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Little Women is a novel by American author Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888), which was originally published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869. Alcott wrote the books rapidly over several months at the request of her publisher. The novel follows the lives of four sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March—detailing their passage from childhood to womanhood, and is loosely based on the author and her three sisters.

Little Women was an immediate commercial and critical success, and readers demanded to know more about the characters. Alcott quickly completed a second volume (entitled Good Wives in the United Kingdom, although this name derived from the publisher and not from Alcott). It was also successful. The two volumes were issued in 1880 in a single work entitled Little Women. Alcott also wrote two sequels to her popular work, both of which also featured the March sisters: Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886). Although Little Women was a novel for girls, it differed notably from the current writings for children, especially girls. The novel addressed three major themes: "domesticity, work, and true love, all of them interdependent and each necessary to the achievement of its heroine's individual identity."

Little Women "has been read as a romance or as a quest, or both. It has been read as a family drama that validates virtue over wealth", but also "as a means of escaping that life by women who knew its gender constraints only too well". According to Sarah Elbert, Alcott created a new form of literature, one that took elements from Romantic children's fiction and combined it with others from sentimental novels, resulting in a totally new format. Elbert argued that within Little Women can be found the first vision of the "All-American girl" and that her multiple aspects are embodied in the differing March sisters.

The book has been adapted for film twice as silent films, and four times with sound, in 1933, 1949, 1978 and 1994. Four television series were made, including two in Britain in the 1950s and two anime series in Japan in the 1980s. A musical version opened on Broadway in 2005. An American opera version in 1998 has been performed internationally and filmed for broadcast on US television in 2001.

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A book illustrator, Frank T. Merrill is listed in The Who's Who of Artists as a native of Dorchester, born in 1848.

He was born in Boston on 14 December 1848, the son of George William Merrill and Sarah Rose Alden. He studied at Boston Latin, the Lowell Institute and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. After travel and study in Europe, he began a career as a book illustrator. He illustrated standard editions of English classics, such as Thackeray and Scott, and original works by many American authors, including Hawthorn and Twain. In 2002, the Concord (MA) Museum mounted an exhibition of Merrill's original sketches for the 1880 edition of Little Women and his correspondence with Louisa May Alcott. 

Merrill's wife, Jessie S. Aldrich, purchased the land on Tremlett Street on 13 May 1886 for "One dollar and other valuable considerations". The quitclaim deed specifies that "no dwelling house shall be erected on said land to cost less than Five Thousand Dollars, and shall be set back in the line of the house recently built and occupied by said Mansfield" [number 18, destroyed by fire in the early 1970s]. The third floor of the house contains large studio lit by a Palladian-windowed dormer. The house backed up to the Colonial Club on Washington Street.