Louisa May Alcott: American Masters

Elizabeth Marvel as Louisa May Alcott, the author of the celebrated novel Little Women

Tune in and learn more about Little Women author Louisa May Alcott.

As the author of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott's name is almost universally recognized. Her reputation as a morally upstanding New England spinster, reflecting the conventional propriety of late 19th-century Concord, is firmly established. However, raised among reformers, Transcendentalists and skeptics, the intellectual protégé of Emerson and Hawthorne and Thoreau, Alcott was actually a free thinker with democratic ideals and progressive values about women — a worldly careerist of sorts. Most surprising is that she led, under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard, a literary double life, undiscovered until the 1940s. As Barnard, Alcott penned scandalous, sensational works with characters running the gamut from murderers and revolutionaries to cross-dressers and opium addicts — a far cry from her familiar fatherly mentors, courageous mothers and appropriately impish children. Louisa May Alcott: American Masters airs Saturday, January 2 at 2 p.m. on WXXI-WORLD.