Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was a celebrated 19th-century American novelist, short story writer, and poet, best known for her semi-autobiographical novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels. Raised in a progressive, Transcendentalist family in New England, she became a pioneering writer who championed women's independence, abolitionism, and suffrage.