Louisa May Alcott once rolled her hoop two miles without stopping. She could jump any fence in the village of Concord and run faster than almost any boy in town. But she also wrote, directed and acted in plays that kept the family and all the neighbors amused. Among the delighted spectators there were often such celebrated friends as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. It took a touch of genius to hold the attention of such intelligent men, and Louisa could make them roar with laughter.

Not all of her life was this gay, however. The Alcotts were constantly poor — sometimes so poor they were actually without food. Louisa and her three sisters always wore patched shoes and made-over dresses and homemade hats. They faced their poverty courageously, but Louisa dreamed that the day would come when her writing would make her so much money that she could provide abundantly for her impractical father, her beloved and overworked mother and all three of her sisters.

Sometimes, however, it seemed that this far-off heavenly time would never come. Meanwhile "Marmee" took in sewing, her father, Bromon, often left his books to do menial labor, and smallpox and scarlet fever swept through the family. In Boston, Concord and particularly in the communal colony at Fruitlands, fate dealt the Alcotts ceaseless blows. How Louisa surmounted all these difficulties and lived to make her dream come true with a best seller named Little Women is the inspiring theme of this dramatic biography.

The characters Meg, Beth, Amy and Jo were in many ways, although not all ways remarkably like Anna, Beth, May and Louisa Alcott. Helen Papashvily, drawing upon the diaries and letters of this lively and literate family, gives us a vivid picture of a family of near-genius who might be cold, hungry and ill-clothed but who somehow retained highly admirable traits such as family loyalty, idealism, courage and the gift of laughter. Teen-agers of today will enjoy, and also benefit, from this book.

"Ever since I read Little Women at the age of ten, Louisa May Alcott has been a treasured friend," Helen Papashvily says, "and to write her biography was a rich experience." Visiting the places she lived, the scenes she knew in Concord, Boston and New Hampshire, reading and re-reading her books and early sketches, her diaries and letters (and those written by her parents and sisters) sharing her struggles, triumphs and more. Courageous, daring, imaginative, ambitious, Louisa May Alcott's own life was more dramatic and adventurous than any story she ever wrote."

From the dust jacket