Louisa May Alcott was born on November 29, 1832, making today her 184th birthday. Today's Google doodle by Sophie Diao honours the writer by capturing the March sisters from Alcott's "Little Women."
"Little Women" is Alcott's most famous novel, loosely based on her childhood in Concord, Massachusetts. The March family was based on her own, with the strong-willed Jo a stand-in for Alcott herself.
"I want to do something splendid before I go into my castle, something heroic or wonderful that won't be forgotten after I'm dead," wrote Alcott, as Jo, in the book. "I don't know what, but I'm on the watch for it, and mean to astonish you all some day."
Best known for her writing, Alcott's achievements stretched far beyond her novels and short stories and astonish she did. Alcott was a tireless suffragist, feminist and abolitionist. She served as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War and her home was a station on the Underground Railroad. As a lifelong advocate for feminism and women's suffrage, she also became the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Massachusetts.
She grew up alongside other famous Americans like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau, who all share her final resting place in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Massachusetts, the burial site for some of the United States' most renowned writers and thinkers.