Alcott was born on November 29, 1832 on his father's 33rd birthday. His father, Bronson Alcott, was a transcendentalist and an educator. He, along with close family friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau all believed that human beings were fundamentally spirits who just happened to be in a particular physical form. So it is perhaps unsurprising that Bronson's third child, though assigned female at birth, would feel so openly conflicted about his gender. There is a profound amount of evidence that Alcott thought of himself as more of a man than a woman — someone, as he wrote, in one letter to his close friend Alfie Whitman, “born with a boy’s nature, a boy’s spirit, & a boy’s wrath."
To family and friends, he was almost never Louisa, but rather Lou, Lu, or Louy. He wrote about himself as "papa" or "father" to their young nephews. In letters to Whitman, Alcott called himself “a man of all work” and “a gentleman at large.” His own father, as Lou went off to serve in the Civil War wrote that he felt he was "losing his only son".
Still, in spite of this mountain of evidence, it's important to be cautious about imposing our words and terms and understandings on a previous era. Lou Alcott may have experienced what we would call today "gender dysphoria" - they certainly exhibit all the outward signs. But the way people in the 19th century thought about gender, sex, sexual identity, and sexuality is very different from the way we think about it today. The term "transgender" had not even been invented yet, and who knows whether or not Lou himself would have identified with it. However, Alcott’s description of the divide between his female body and his male nature is certainly trans as we understand that term today.
The second of four children, all of whom were assigned female at birth, Alcott was a tomboy who preferred boys' games instead. Alcott's father moved the family to Boston in 1834, while Lou was just a baby. There, he established an experimental school with the help of fellow transcendentalist friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. However, after several financial setbacks with the school, they moved again. And again. And yet again. All told, Alcott's family moved a total of twenty-one times in twenty-six years, finally settling in "Orchard House", a two-story clapboard farmhouse, in the spring of 1858.
During this time, Lou received an education from such luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, and Julia Ward Howe, all of whom were family friends. He also wrote and published autobiographical poems and sketches, such as "Thoreau's Flute", about his time at Walden Pond. The proceeds from these sales helped support the family finances.
Poverty made it necessary for Alcott and his sisters to take work at an early age as teachers, seamstresses, governesses, and domestic helpers to support the family, while their mother took on social work among the Irish immigrants. All of these pressures found an outlet in Lou's first book, "Flower Fables". It was a selection of fanciful short stories originally written for Ellen Emerson, daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Despite good sales, Lou received just $35 for its publication.
In 1847, Alcott and his family opened their home for use as a safehouse for the Underground Railroad. They housed a fugitive for a week, and Lou had discussions with Frederick Douglass. Lou also read and admired the Declaration of Sentiments published by the Seneca Falls Convention on women's rights, advocating for women's suffrage and subsequently became the first person assigned female at birth to register to vote in Concord, Massachusetts.
The 1850s were hard times for the Alcott family. Lou wrote a small play for the local theatre but burned it in anger after a dispute with the lead actress. Afterwards, he took a job that promised to pay well caring for a woman with neuralgia, but after seven weeks, when he received his first paycheck for only $4, he quit on the spot and mailed the money back. As he always did, Lou tried to pour his life experiences into his writing. He drafted a slightly fictionalized account of the job titled "How I Went Into Service", and submitted it to a publisher in Boston named James T Fields. Fields promptly rejected the piece, telling Alcott he had no future as a writer.
Then, when it seemed things couldn't get any worse, his older sister was married off to a man named John Pratt, and his younger sister Elizabeth died suddenly in 1958. Lou felt alone and destitute in ways he never had before - in spirit, in creative energy, in family support, and of course in cold hard cash. Lou found himself contemplating suicide. This was his rock bottom.
Despite this, Alcott didn't give up. He took a job writing abolitionist and feminist articles for the Atlantic Monthly. When the Civil War began, he served briefly as a nurse in the Georgetown, D.C area, but contracted typhoid fever, and became ill after only 3 weeks of service. He eventually recovered, and published his letters home as a literary collection, called "Hospital Sketches" in 1863. He wrote about the mismanagement of hospitals, the indifference and callousness of some of the surgeons he encountered, and his passion for seeing the war firsthand. This time, his book was a resounding hit, bringing him his first critical recognition for his sharp observations and witty humor.
Between 1863 and 1872, Lou would throw his creative energy entirely into his writing. He anonymously wrote at least 33 "gothic thrillers" for local magazines and newspapers, and dozens of passionate, fiery "sensation stories" with titles like "A Long Fatal Love Chase" and "Pauline's Passion and Punishment". He also wrote one of the earliest works of detective fiction in all of English-language literature, preceded only by Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue".
It is during this explosion of creative and literary output that Lou Alcott first met Thomas Niles, while working part time as an editor for the children's magazine "Merry's Museum". It was Niles who first suggested that Lou write something that would appeal especially to young women.
Lou laughed in his face. "What do I know about women??" he scoffed. "I don't even know many, except my sisters". But, something about the suggestion stuck. Lou did what he always did. He wrote about what he knew. Drawing on his own experiences, he modeled the book's heroine, "Jo", on himself - a fierce, passionate tomboy willing to fight the world to get what she wanted out of it. Members of the Alcott family have parallels in the book too. Beth's death mirrors his sister Elizabeth's. And Jo's rivalry with Amy bears remarkable similarity to Lou's own rivalry with his own sister Abigail May.
One of the most obvious differences between Lou and Jo is, of course the fact that Jo marries at the end of the story, whereas Lou remained stalwartly single till the end of his life. He once wrote about his spinsterhood: "I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man’s soul, put by some freak of nature into a woman’s body...I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man."
Louisa May "Lou" Alcott died of a stroke at age 55 in Boston, on March 6th, 1888, two days after his father's death. He is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, near his good friends, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau, on a hillside now known as Authors' Ridge. He was his father's son.
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