Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) is an American-American writer who enjoys enormous appreciation and affection among readers of yesterday and today, especially for the trilogy of Little Women (Little Women, Little Men and Jo's Boys), which has as its protagonist to the March family, based in part on the writer's own family. She was a woman of surprising personality, animated by humanitarian impulses (she was a nurse during the Civil War) and protector of many good causes such as abolitionism and suffragism). She had an overwhelming success with Little Women, and in her New York Times obituary she declared: "There was probably no female writer more loved by young women than she."