Louisa May Alcott Society

The Louisa May Alcott Society is sponsoring two panels at the 33rd Annual Conference of the American Literature Association [ALA], to be held May 26-29, 2022, The Palmer House Hilton, 17 East Monroe, Chicago, IL 60603.  Session 1: The Literary Nonfiction of Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain   Although Alcott and Twain are perhaps most famous for their later novels about young people, they each became famous in the 1860s for their hilarious but often dark nonfiction writings—Alcott’s Hospital Sketches (1863) and Twain’s The Innocents Abroad (1869)—and both continued writing nonfiction books and sketches throughout their careers. This panel aims to offer a critical reassessment of the significance of Alcott’s and Twain’s nonfiction work, within the context of nineteenth-century society and culture or in light of recent critical perspectives on literary nonfiction as a genre. Attention to major works (such as Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, Roughing It, and Innocents or Alcott’s Shawl Str

The Celebrating Louisa May Alcott event was a joy and a success. Thank you to Jamie, Jill, and Azelina for sharing their projects with us! If you were unable to join us at the event when it happened, you can watch the event here .  ------   Join us for a very special online celebration of the birthday and career of Louisa May Alcott! Celebrating Louisa May Alcott Sunday, November 28, 2021 3:00 p.m. Eastern, 2:00 Central, 1:00 Mountain, 12:00n Pacific Via Zoom   This year’s event will feature talks from Jamie Burgess and Jill Fuller, the creators and hosts of the  Let Genius Burn  podcast , and Azelina Flint, author of the recently published  The Matrilineal Heritage of Louisa May Alcott and Christina Rossetti  (Routledge 2021). There will also be some lively discussion and some social connecting and reconnecting. So bring your own preferred dessert, snack, or drink: leftovers, cookies, cocoa, a glass of wine, Alcott’s own  Apple Slump , or whatever you would enjoy, while learning some

The Louisa May Alcott Society was represented at the recent Society for the Study of American Women Writers Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, being held November 4-7, 2021. The conference theme was "American Women Writers: Ecologies, Survival, Change." Our Society participated as the very first session to open the conference on Thursday, November 4th at 8:30 a.m. Our session was titled “Gothic Ecologies: Alcott, Her Contexts, and Contemporaries,” chaired by Dr. Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, Distinguished Professor at Pennsylvania State University, Altoona, and Past President of the Alcott Society. The session featured a paper by Kari Miller (Perimeter College at Georgia State University) called "'Never Mind the Boys': Gothic Persuasions of Jane Goodwin Austin and Louisa May Alcott" and another by Wendy Fall (Marquette University) on "Alcott in the Cadre of Scribbling Women: 'Realizing' the Female Gothic for Nineteenth Century American Periodicals