An American novelist best known as author of the novel Little Women and its sequels. Raised by her transcendentalist parents in New England, she grew up among many of the well-known intellectuals of the day such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau. Nevertheless, her family suffered severe financial difficulties and she worked to help support the family from an early age. She began to receive critical success for her writing in the 1860s. Early in her career, she sometimes used the pen name A. M. Barnard.