Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) was raised in Concord, Massachusetts. She was the second of four daughters of Abba May and Bronson Alcott, prominent Transcendentalist thinkers and reformers, and grew up knowing Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau, all of whom taught her at one point or another. She worked as a nurse during the Civil War before starting to write, and she later campaigned for women's suffrage and the temperance movement. She died on the day her father was buried.