Description
Near Fine dust jacket , very slight wear at edges, a mylar dust jacket has been added. Near Fine binding is dark blue cloth over boards, light blue cloth-backed. Black-and-white portrait illustrations within. The binding is tight and pages are clean. The book measures 9.5″ tall x 7.4″ wide. Stated “First Edition” the number “1” is present in the number line indicating a first printing.
About the book (from the dust jacket)
This is the story of the lives of the nineteenth-century philosopher and educator Amos Bronson Alcott, his wife, Abby May; and their four daughters, Anna, Louisa, Elizabeth, and May. The Alcotts were the real-life prototypes for the Marches in Little Women, and with this biography, the first of a two-volume work, Madelon Bedell provides an intimate, compelling reexamination the truth behind the Alcott/March family legend. She explores the relationships among the four sisters and portrays a marriage between two vital and complex personalities-opposites in every way.
Abby and Bronson Alcott created a family bond so compelling that not one of their four daughters ever really escaped their early life—the charmed circle of sisterhood given form and content in Little Women by Louisa, the most illustrious Alcott of them all. The story of this extraordinary family evolves against a background of intellectual ferment and convulsive social change bringing to life such leading figures of the New England Renaissance as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller
Bronson Alcott had great impact on his time. His experimental schools anticipated many of the ideas of Dewey and other educational theorists of the next century; the infant diaries he kept of his three oldest daughters from the hour of birth through early childhood mark the inception of child psychology in the United States
Alcott’s interior life was intense. A highly sexed and driven man wrote startlingly erotic poetry, which is printed here for the first time, He suffered periodic episodes or extreme mental breakdown, saved only by the sustaining presence of his family his wife, the hitherto little-known Abby Alcott, was the real woman behind the “Marmee'” of Little Women striking personage, a radical thinker- and an early feminist The Alcotts offers letters, diaries journals, and rare photographs of the family that have never before been published. These combined materials make up what is probably the most extensive personal record of the nineteenth century in America, After eight years of original research Madelon Bedell has created a dramatic new picture of the Alcotts as seminal American figures. The family created by the union of Bronson and Abbv lies at the source of ‘our image of the American family–with all its turbulence, contradiction, and strength.
About the author (from the dust jacket)
MADELON BEDELL grew up in Oak Park and River Forest, Illinois, graduated from Smith College, and was tor many years a journalist associated with Life and Fortune magazines. The mother of three children. she lives with her husband, an engineer, in Brooklyn, New York.
