1934: INVINCIBLE LOUISA: THE STORY OF THE AUTHOR OF LITTLE WOMEN by Cornelia Meigs
The highroad which stretches from within the State of Pennsylvania down to the Delaware River becomes, as it nears Philadelphia, the main street of Germantown.
Unlike most Newbery winners, 1934 medalist Invincible Louisa is nonfiction - specifically, a biography of Louisa May Alcott. Unlike most biographies, the most interesting character in Invincible Louisa is not the actual subject of the book. Not that Louisa May Alcott doesn't come off as interesting; you can tell from Cornelia Meigs' work that Alcott is brilliant and resilient and overcame many unexpected hurdles to write Little Women, a beloved work of American literature that would go on to become a 2019 film in which Bob Odenkirk, America's greatest actor, shows up out of nowhere halfway through to say the title of the movie.
Little Women (the novel) was a huge commercial success immediately upon publication, in large part because it was relatable, in an era when few pieces of children's literature were relatable. Instead of a fantastical landscape or aristocratic bluebloods, young readers got to see a family just like theirs, dealing with the same quiet struggles and triumphs that they experienced. Part of the reason the novel was so relatable was because it was so real, as Alcott incorporated plenty of autobiographical elements into her story and modeled the characters after her own family, with Jo as a very obvious stand-in for Alcott herself.
But one character didn't fully translate from real life to the page, presumably because he wasn't very relatable at all:
"In the rather shadowy figure of the March girls' father, it is hard to recognize Bronson Alcott. Louisa always meant to write a book which should have her father as the central character…she was so unlike Bronson that although she was devoted to him, there were certain of his ideas which she did not truly comprehend, certain phases of his life to which she felt that she could not do justice, since she did not quite fathom the motives which lay behind them. She waited all of her life for the moment when she really would understand him fully; and she waited too long, for the book was never written."
There weren't very many people like him, there weren't very many people in his line of work, there weren't many people who thought like he did, and there weren't many people who had the same friends that he did. As interesting as Louisa May Alcott is, it's damn near impossible for anyone to be as interesting as her father, Bronson Alcott.
Bronson Alcott was a prominent member of the New England Transcendentalist movement in the mid-nineteenth century, which means he regularly hung out with some of the biggest names from your high school American Lit class1. The Alcott house regularly hosted people like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the latter of whom gladly let young Louisa read in and borrow books from his personal library.
Bronson wasn't an author, though; he was a teacher and pedagogue, one who was trying to reimagine education and classrooms from the ground up. It was Bronson who came up with such innovative educational ideas as…uh, making sure classrooms received natural light:
"Bronson had theories so far in advance of his time that even in our day we have not caught up with all of them, although we have accepted many. It used to be thought, and not so long ago, that the windows of a schoolroom must have white paint on all the lower panes, to keep the children from looking out, and incidentally to keep light and sunshine from coming in. It was Bronson Alcott who first opened the windows of schoolrooms to more than one kind of sunshine and who has made learning brighter for all time."
Ok, so when I (and Meigs) say that Bronson was an innovator, that is sometimes more a statement on the time in which he lived than on Bronson himself. Bronson had principles and a strong moral backbone that often put him at odds with his community, most clearly on the issue of slavery. Bronson was a proud abolitionist - William Lloyd Garrison was another frequent guest at the Alcott household - and when running one of his first schools in Boston, Bronson refused to turn away black students. Parents protested, and Bronson was eventually run out of town, marking the only time in history that the people of Boston had retrograde views on race broadly and school integration specifically. The Alcotts soon found themselves moving to Concord, the center of the Transcendentalist movement, to try and build the society that Thoreau and Emerson and their friends had always dreamed about, on a campus they named "Fruitlands". And here, Bronson ran up against the extreme limits of his principles and idealism.
In short, the Transcendentalist commune that the Alcotts and their friends were trying to build in Concord could not sustain itself. The plan for the commune was to maintain a farm to feed itself, but the labor required to keep it going was too back-breaking, especially for the Alcott children (and, to an extent, the Transcendentalist writers and philosophers, who, despite their ideals, were still "indoor kids" at heart). There wasn’t enough food to go around, plenty of people left the community after they realized it wasn't working, and Fruitlands remains a museum to this day. None of this is really shocking: ideas flop all of the time, especially big utopian ideas that involve hard manual labor and living with other people. The fact that Bronson's work flopped right after his school had flopped also made things harder, but I don't think it caught him entirely by surprise. What made things much more difficult - unexpectedly so - was that there was a utopian community, across the street from Fruitlands, who had actually figured it out and were successfully maintaining a self-sufficient community, and you can maybe see the problem here: members of Fruitlands were wondering if they should just cut bait with their current community and go across the street to the Shakers.
The Shakers were very different than the Alcott family. You might already know why. If you don't know why, here's a hint: today, there are only three practicing Shakers.
The Shakers in Concord did achieve everything that the Fruitlands community had set out to establish: they did live in a self-sufficient, self-sustaining community, one that was truly egalitarian, in which every member contributed equally to the work and shared equally in the fruits of that labor. But Shakers don’t get married, don’t have sex, and don’t have children. The reason that there are a single digit’s worth of Shakers around today is because they didn’t reproduce and they’ve all died out. It turns out that it’s a lot easier to build the world you want when you don’t have kids around. It’s easier to get the work done, it’s easier to vote on how to run the community, it’s easier to have everyone follow the rules.
This is, to some extent, something every parent comes to terms with, in a way that is very obvious. You have kids, and you’re not doing the same things you used to do anymore, you’re not doing whatever you want all of the time, you have to dedicate your time and energy to raising and loving another little person. And that's okay, if a little melancholy, because you love that little person very much and you're willing to do it for her. Bronson had four of those little people, and he loved them very much. Fruitlands had flopped, but that was life. It’s not like you can just up and decide to give your daughters away and tear your family apart just so you can try and perfect your utopian Transcendentalist society.
Right?
Here’s where things get interesting: that was an option that Bronson did actually consider, according to Meigs’ account in Invincible Louisa. Charles Lane, who ran Fruitlands with Bronson, made him consider it:
"Lane thought they ought not to be there, Abba [Bronson’s wife], Anna, Louisa, and the little girls. He was trying to persuade Bronson to give them up, to live as the Shakers did, and to forget that they ever were a family. Louisa’s heart stood still at the very thought. Few children loved their parents and each other as did the little Alcotts. They had so little else, but they at least had one another…her mild, visionary father, with his great ideas, needed them all to help him keep safely in the path of ordinary life. Charles Lane might insist that for the sake of a tremendous purpose a man ought to give up such small things as family love, loyalty, and devotion to one’s own. He did not know that it is upon such things that the very structure of life is built. It was in those dark and desperate days that Louisa learned to know the truth of what family life should be, learned it and never forgot.”
Now, Charles Lane does not strike me as a particularly cool dude. What he was asking of Bronson was insane, and not at all on a par with the sacrifices the Shakers were making, since the Shakers had signed up for a life of celibacy, not raising four kids and then going “ah well”. But Bronson wrestled with this decision, while Fruitlands was continuing to collapse after he had poured everything he had into it, harder than perhaps anything else he had thought through in his life. The stress of it almost killed him and he was bedridden for days.
But remember, Bronson was also the educational innovator who came up with “maybe we should make classrooms into places people actually want to be instead of depressing unlit hellholes”. Bronson was a man who knew that children deserved respect. So before he made his decision, he sat down with his wife and two oldest daughters, including Louisa, to hear what they wanted. They wanted the family to stay together, and they did.
When I said "you have kids, and you’re not doing the same things you used to do anymore," I was mainly referring to lower-stakes situations than this. For example, I don't keep with new music as much as I used to before becoming a dad. But Bronson really had to think through whether he was giving up his chance to change the world, whether he was giving up on the movement he believed in so much and had worked for all of his life. These guys really thought that if they could get Fruitlands right, or get something like Fruitlands right, they could save the world. Now, I don't think they were necessarily correct in thinking that, but the reality is that they didn't get it right and they didn't save the world. And Bronson had to come to terms with the fact that he wasn't going to save the world. But nothing was going to stop him from saving his family.
The story of Bronson having to abandon Fruitlands is tragic and sweet and moving, and, perhaps most importantly, it was an inspiration to young Louisa May. You don't get to Little Women without a father who cared more about his daughters than his life's work. You don't get to Little Women without an author who was so inspired by her father's idealism and selflessness that she hustled to write a hit novel for years, all so she could provide for her sisters and parents. You don’t get to Little Women without an author who learned from her father how to respect children, so that “youthful readers all feel entirely that Louisa is on their side”. And you don't get to Little Women without a family that had ideals and principles and morals but knew that first and foremost, they had each other.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 2004 medalist, The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo.
But the most important part of his literary legacy is that the high school in Clueless is named after him.