American writer and activist Louisa May Alcott was BOTD in 1932. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to a free-thinking liberal family, her parents were friends with Transcendentalist writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Her father proved incapable of financially supporting the family, forcing Alcott to work from her early teens to support her mother and younger siblings. Raised as an abolitionist and feminist, she came to public attention for her sketches of hospital life, inspired by her experiences as a nurse in the American Civil War. She became a full-time writer, producing Gothic thrillers for popular magazines. She found international success with her 1868 novel Little Women, a coming-of-age story of the four March sisters, based on her own childhood. Jo, the tomboyish writer who resists men and marriage, is thought to be Alcott’s alter ego, though Alcott married her off to a middle-aged German professor in her 1868 sequel Good Wives. Alcott shrewdly negotiated with her publishers to retain copyright in her work and take a share of sale profits, making her independently wealthy. Unlike Jo, Alcott remained defiantly unmarried, commenting “I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe”. Biographers are generally agreed that she was sexually attracted to women. In an 1884 interview, she said, possibly jokingly, “I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man’s soul, put by some freak of nature into a woman’s body, because I have fallen in love in my life with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with a man.” After the death of her younger sister in 1879, Alcott adopted and raised her niece Lulu. She died suddenly of a stroke in 1888, aged 55. Little Women remains one of the most popular novels of all time, inspiring generations of women to become writers, establishing female-led experience as a valid subject for literature, and adapted countless times for the stage and screen. Jo was famously played by Katharine Hepburn in George Cukor’s 1933 film of Little Women, personifying the character’s androgyny, athleticism and disinterest in men and romance.