Born into a family with connections to both Transcendentalism and abolitionism, Louisa May Alcott associated as a child with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, Theodore Parker, Julia Ward Howe, and Lydia Maria Child. She's best known for writing the semi-autobiographical Little Women, which was first published on September 30, 1868, but she was also a Civil War nurse and advocate of social reform such as temperance and women's rights. Read more about this 19th century American woman writer: Louisa May Alcott