On this day in 1868 Louisa May Alcott's Little Women was published. It was an immediate best seller, bringing the thirty-five-year-old Alcott a cult following of teenage girls and a hero status which she grew to regret. In her letters she scorned "the young generation of autograph fiends" that were lionizing her, and when she left for Europe, she took precautions: "Don't give anyone my address," she wrote her publisher, "I don't want the young ladies' notes." But the book -- in all, three-dozen books and hundreds of stories -- made good the vow she had made to herself early on: that, though a woman, she would make both her own and her parents' living, and that she would do it by writing ... FULL STORY »
