Now in production, the first television biography of an American icon, from American Masters and Nancy Porter Productions.
ouisa Alcott was her own best character, and her life was dramatic, funny, surprising, and mysterious enough for several novels. Louisa May Alcott: The Real Woman Who Wrote Little Women will trace her struggle from poverty to wealth and celebrity, the lifelong conflict between her powerful desires and her family's powerful needs, and her dedication to mastering the art and craft of writing.
The first film biography of this protean personality will tell its story through dramatizations, interviews with scholars and devotees, and clips from film and television adaptations. The film will draw upon a rich trove of archival materials, make use of the new imagery of digital animation, and take advantage of authentic historic locations.
Historic Locations Include
- Orchard House - the Alcott home where Louisa wrote and set Little Women.
- Fruitlands - site of Bronson Alcott's disastrous utopian experiment.
- Wayside - site of the events fictionalized in Little Women, later Hawthorne's home.
- The Emerson House - where Louisa passed many hours in the library.
- Walden Pond - where young Louisa studied nature with Thoreau.
- The Concord School of Philosophy - Bronson Alcott's summer lyceum.
- Beacon Hill, Boston - ten residences of the peripatetic Louisa.
- The Alcott-Thoreau house - where Emerson told Louisa of the death of May Alcott.
- Sleepy Hollow Cemetery - where Louisa is buried at the foot of her parents' graves.
Gregory Eiselein, Associate Professor of English, Kansas State University, co-editor of The Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia and Little Women: A Critical Edition.
Sarah Elbert, S.U.N.Y. Binghamton, author of A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott's Place in American Culture:
Elise V. Lemire, Assistant Professor of Literature, Purchase College, State University of New York, author of Miscegenation: Making Race in America.
John Matteson, Department of English, John Jay College. Author of Eden's Outcasts, The Story of Louisa May Alcott and her Father.
Joel Myerson, Carolina Distinguihed Professor of American Literature, University of South Carolina, Co-Editor of Alcott's Journals and Letters:
Anne K. Phillips, Associate Professor of Children's Literature, Kansas State University, co-editor of The Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia and Little Women: A Critical Edition.
Shirley Samuels, Professor of English, Cornell University, editor of The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America.
Daniel Shealy, Professor of English, University of North Carolina, Co-Editor of Alcott's Journals and Letters:
Madeleine B. Stern, author of Louisa May Alcott: A Biography, and Leona Rostenberg, rare book dealer whose discovery of an Alcott pseudonymn revealed her as the author of dozens of lurid "thrillers":
Jan Turnquist, Director, Orchard house
...Viewers will finally understand Louisa May Alcott's place in American culture. The project is both brilliant and timely."
- Sarah Elbert
