The True Story of Little Women

(cheery music) - Louisa May Alcott started writing quite young.

Her first attempts were really in a journal that her father helped her start.

He would put the pencil in her hand and put his hand over, and say, "Now, what did you wanna say?"

and show her how to form those letters.

When she was a nurse, during the Civil War, she wrote for publications something that was based on her real life.

It sold better than all of her previous works.

After "Hospital Sketches" received such acclaim, a publisher in Boston came to Louisa and asked her if she could use that same technique and write a realistic girls' story.

She wrote what today we would say is the first half of "Little Women" very quickly, it was about six and a half weeks, right here in this room.

All of the raw material for Little Women was really pretty well- recorded in her journals.

Some of her earlier stories, way before "Little Women" were precursors of things that she would write into "Little Women."

Meg's wedding is exactly how it took place for Anna.

Louisa really took her journal entries of that day and used them to write Meg's wedding scenes in Little Women.

The girls give away their breakfast on Christmas morning.

That's a true story.

For the Alcotts, it was New Years morning.

She really thought that it was going to be dull, "Our lives were too odd.

"Who would wanna read about us?"

Thomas Niles, the man who had asked her to write it, at first thought the same thing, "Eh, I don't think this is going to succeed."

But he gave the book to his niece, she loved it, and the more people who started to love the book, the more Louisa took another look at it and actually said later in her journal that she was beginning to think that her Marches were rather nice people.

Then, she's off.

She's off to the races.

People are immediately enamored with the book.

It begins to be translated into other languages.

People would knock and come to the door and want her autograph, and say, "Oh, is the house of the Little Women?

"Might we come in?"

It was a little overwhelming.

She would put on an apron, and go to the door, as if she were the maid, put on a little accent, "Oh, Ms.

Alcott's not at home," (laughs) and they would go away.

When she first sent it off to the publisher, she said, "I doubt anything will come of it, "but we really lived most of it.

"If it should succeed, that will be the reason."

(cheery music)