It was not until 1994 that Byron De La Beckwith, a white supremacist and long-time Klan member then age 74, was found guilty of first-degree murder in the 1963 killing of civil rights activist and U.S. Army veteran, Medgar Evers. De La Beckwith had been tried decades earlier for his horrific crime—he shot Evers in the back, with a rifle, as Evers stood in the driveway of his Jackson, Miss., home—but two trials ended in hung juries. When De La Beckwith was finally held accountable, Evers’ widow Myrlie, who had fought for justice for her husband for more than 30 years, felt she might finally be free of the anger and hate she had borne for so long. Her words upon hearing the verdict? “Yes, Medgar!”
Here, LIFE.com presents a series of photographs by John Loengard, including one that remains among the most stirring of the Civil Rights era: a portrait of a dignified, deeply grieving Myrlie Evers comforting her weeping son, Darrell Kenyatta, at Evers’ funeral
Evers killing was just at the start of the pattern of domestic terrorism that would, in some ways, define the era—the murders of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King and others had not yet occurred. The daylight killing of a man of Evers’ stature and significance was appalling. Although to the Evers family and to those on the front lines, not unforeseen, “We all knew the danger was increasing,” Myrlie Evers wrote in the June 28, 1963 edition of LIFE. “Threats came daily, cruel and cold and constant, against us and the children. But we had lived with this hatred for years and we did not let it corrode us.”
Medgar Evers was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery on June 19, 1963.
Myrlie Evers comforted her son, Darrell Kenyatta Evers, at the funeral of murdered civil-rights activist Medgar Evers
John Loengard The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy and other civil rights leaders walked in Medgar Evers’ funeral procession, Jackson, Miss.
John Loengard The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Mourners bid farewell to slain NAACP official Medgar Evers at his funeral.
John Loengard The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Mourners at Medgar Evers’ funeral, Jackson, Miss.
John Loengard The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Mourners at Medgar Evers’ funeral.
John Loengard The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Mourners at Medgar Evers’ funeral, Jackson, Miss.
John Loengard The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Myrlie Evers (front row, second from right), wife of Medgar Evers; her son, Darrell Kenyatta; and other mourners at Medgar Evers’ funeral, Jackson, Miss.
John Loengard The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
LIFE magazine, June 28, 1963.
John Loengard The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
One of the most innovative and original artists of modern times, Christo, died at age 84 on May 31, 2020. His death came 11 years after the passing of his wife, Jeanne-Claude. Known as artists under a singular name, ‘Christo and Jeanne-Claude,’ they worked as one to create their eye-grabbing, large-scale site-specific installations.
Christo in front of his environmental installation “Corridor Store Front.”
To commemorate Christo is to ponder an eccentric designer of architectural clothing. His projects with Jeanne-Claude, called wrappings, masterfully dressed buildings and monuments in an act that was both a makeover and a demolition. Although his most recent works made use of colored barrels, curtains, archways, and island extensions, his most iconic pieces deployed vast swaths of sheeting made from plastics and fabrics. The sheets, held up by miles of thick, prickly-strung rope, billowed in cascades and met at the cinches.
In 1968 LIFE staffer Carlo Bavagnolicaptured Christo gracefully constructing his first large-scale wrapping project, and Bavagnoli also shot two other installations by Christo and Jeanne-Claude that same year. These photos capture Christo’s skill at highlighting both the physical and bureaucratic structures that surround public architecture.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s wrappings challenged the visual presence of public architecture by, as Art News put it in their tribute to the late artist, “deconstructing and reconstructing the way we think about those structures.” In effect, their sheets covered fine architectural details but highlighted building structure. Sharp juts of corners and smooth curves of domes became accentuated, while a new void of color and texture called on viewers’ memories to fill in the details of a building that was simultaneously on display but held hostage.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude bunched up plastic sheeting while constructing “5,600 Cubic Meter Package,” for Documenta IV in 1968.
The artwork was more than the finished product. Every step and challenge of a wrapping constituted the piece. Christo and Jeanne-Claude pushed back against the wills of city officials, insurers, and engineers to gain permissions. Exploring the restraints of these civil systems was part of the work. In 1972 Christo told the New York Times:
“For me esthetics is everything involved in the process – the workers, the politics, the negotiations, the construction difficulty, the dealings with hundreds of people… The whole process becomes an esthetic – that’s what I’m interested in, discovering the process. I put myself in dialogue with other people.”
That process prevented the two from seeing through large-scale wrappings early in their careers. But in 1968, the Kunsthalle in Bern, Switzerland, became the site for their first large-scale wrapping. Wrapped Kunsthalle pushed their nearly decade-old proposals into reality, at last at their imagined scale.
The museum was a running start. During 1968, Christo and Jeanne-Claude embarked on five major projects that involved over 50,000 square feet of sheeting, and over 4 miles of rope. Bavagnoli shot three of these installations.
Wrapped Kunsthalle: Bern, Switzerland
Wrapped Kunsthalle was part of an international group show for the Kunsthalle museum’s 50th anniversary. A dozen artists participated, by presenting a variety of environmental works. Instead of showing something inside the halls, Christo and Jeanne-Claude cloaked the museum in 26,156 square feet of reinforced polyethylene. Christo said of the exhibition, “We took the environments by eleven other artists and wrapped them. We had our whole environment inside.”
Christo stood on top of the Swiss art museum, Kunsthalle, fastening rope and plastic sheeting around a pillar for his installation “Wrapped Kunsthalle,” 1968.
Christo adjusted plastic sheeting on the Swiss art museum, Kunsthalle, as spectators walk by. The covering was part of his installation “Wrapped Kunsthalle,” 1968.
Christo sat on a monument across the street from the Swiss art museum, Kunsthalle, so he could observe his installation work on “Wrapped Kunsthalle,” 1968.
Visitors moved through a slit of plastic sheeting from Christo’s “Wrapped Kunsthalle” to enter the Kunsthalle Swiss art museum. The museum was covered all but for one opening for visitors to move in and out, 1968.
It took six days to wrap the museum, with help from an 11-person team. It was both an installation feat, and a bureaucratic one. Insurance companies refused to protect the museum while it was wrapped. In lieu of insurance, six security guards were hired to stand watch for potential fire and vandalism. The measure was so costly that the building was unwrapped after a week.
A panorama view of Christo’s “Wrapped Kunsthalle,” the Swiss art museum covered in plastic sheeting for an art show celebrating the museum’s 50th anniversary in 1968.
In July 1968, while Christo was working on Wrapped Kunsthalle, Jeanne-Claude was in the town of Spoleto, Italy. The two had proposed wrapping the Spoleto Opera House for the Festival of Two Worlds, but they were denied due to fire laws. Instead, they wrapped a medieval tower landmark and a baroque fountain at the Spoleto marketplace.
With Christo in Bern and Jeanne-Claude in Spoleto, neither was able to see the other’s completed wrapping. But later in the summer, the two reunited and completed 5,600 Cubic Meter Package.
A medieval tower on the outskirts of Spoleto, Italy was wrapped for the “Festival of Two Worlds,” 1968.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude completed 5,600 Cubic Meter Package as part of the contemporary art exhibition, Documenta IV in 1968. The installation was the largest ever inflated structure without a skeleton.
Its construction involved the two tallest cranes Europe had to offer, plus professional riggers, heat sealed fabric and a 3.5-ton steel cradle as a support base. Christo and Jeanne-Claude had a chief engineer, Dimiter Zagoroff, who created the base and helped coordinate the package’s inflation. The result was a striking display of collaboration and engineering work, the sort of which would continue through the rest of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s lifetime of installation.
Christo and his head engineer, Dimiter Zagoroff, discussed the construction of the metal support base for “5,600 Cubic Meter Package,” 1968.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude discussed with their head engineer, Dimiter Zagoroff, the details of construction for “5,600 Cubic Meter Package,” during Documenta IV in 1968.
Christo, Jeanne-Claude, and other members of the construction team, fastened the inflation tube around the metal base of “5,600 Cubic Meter Package,” for Documenta IV in 1968.
The son of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Cyril Christo, read a book during the construction work on “5,600 Cubic Meter Package,” for Documenta IV in Germany, 1968.
Christo used a machine to heat a section of plastic used to seal up “5,600 Cubic Meter Package,” for inflation. The installation was part of Documenta IV in 1968.
Christo worked with his construction team to slide a large roll of plastic into rope casing of his “5,600 Cubic Meter Package,” for Documenta IV in 1968.
The following is from the introduction to the special issue, LIFE: A Story of America in 100 Photographs, which is available here.
A great photograph tells not one story but many, through what it plainly reveals and what it suggests. And great photographers—like great artists, writers, carpenters, farmers, clergy, all—see beyond the limitations of their talent, beyond their resources, to something more. “Never have I found the limits of the photographic potential,” the LIFE photojournalist W. Eugene Smith once observed. “Every horizon, upon being reached, reveals another beckoning in the distance. Always, I am on the threshold.”
Two of Smith’s photographs (Country Doctor, Burning Cross) appear in LIFE, A Story of America in 100 Photographs. Dozens of the others were taken by his colleagues and peers. Indeed, all of the photos in this story have appeared in the magazine or book or website pages of LIFE, which has long been a chronicler of American life. The images trace back to 1850 (soon after the dawn of photography itself, and shortly before the United States was solidified into the Union (as we know it now) and continue, with gorgeous and colorful aplomb, into the 21st century. They are delivered here throughout the decades, each image augmented by a body of text, a story in words and facts meant to add context and understanding, meant to illuminate more than to guide.
If a single photo—and the sentences nestled beside it—carries so many strands of meaning, then so does a collection of photos, bearing a narrative that is at once available in discreet pieces and as a whole. This collection. This narrative. The U.S. flag adds a 49th star. Moving trucks fill suburban driveways. Route 66 invites travelers west. Disneyland opens. John F. Kennedy and wife Jacqueline attend his inaugural ball. Marines in Vietnam carry off wounded comrades. A busboy kneels by the fallen Robert F. Kennedy.
It has been said that you don’t take a photograph, you simply borrow it, nabbing a bit of history, adding those hints of possibility, so as to stand, looking forward or back, on the threshold.
Shirley Temple celebrated her eighth birthday at 20th Century Fox in 1936, when, in the middle of the Great Depression, she was the biggest box office star in America.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Tears streamed down the cheeks of accordion-playing Chief Petty Officer (USN) Graham Jackson as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s flag-draped funeral train left Warm Springs, Ga., April 13, 1945
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
As America began its move westward, Route 66, here shown in Seligman, Arizona in 1947, took on a special romance for those who yearned to strike out for adventure.
Andreas Feininger The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dr. Ernest Ceriani made a house call on foot, Kremmling, Colo., 1948. The generalist was the lone physician serving a Rocky Mountain enclave that covered 400 square miles.
W. Eugene Smith/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Truck driver Robert Nuher and his family gathered around the television in 1949, at a time when screens first invaded the American living room. A new station had just debuted in the Nuhers’ hometown of Erie, Pa.
Five years after the end of World War II, American soldiers were fighting again, the time in Korea. Here Marine Capt. Francis “Ike” Fenton pondered his fate and the fate of his men after being told that his company was nearly out of ammunition, 1950.
David Douglas Duncan
The Golden Gate Bridge, photographed from a helicopter in 1952.
In the years following World War II, Americans flocked to the suburbs. Here moving trucks arrived at a new planned community in Lakewood, Calif. in 1952.
Disneyland opened in 1955 in Anaheim, Calif. Built on what had been 160 acres orange groves and walnut trees, Disneyland wasn’t the world’s first theme park, but it quickly became the standard by which others would be measured.
Billie Holiday, a singular jazz vocalist known for recordings of such songs as “Strange Fruit” and “God Bless the Child,” performed at one of the late night jazz sessions hosted by LIFE photographer Gjon Mili. Holiday, raised partly in a Baltimore brothel and partly in a home for troubled girls, endured childhood sexual abuse and later became addicted to alcohol and heroin, before dying at age 44, in 1959.
President John F. Kennedy, after beginning his presidency with a speech that declared “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans,” celebrated with his wife Jacqueline at his Inaugural Ball.
U.S. Marines carried their wounded during a firefight near the southern edge of the DMZ, Vietnam, October 1966. Photographer Larry Burrows, whose images brought home to LIFE readers in full color the horrors taking place in Vietnam’s lush countryside, was killed along with three other photographers when their helicopter was shot down over Laos in 1971.
Larry Burrows/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Football’s escalation in the American consciousness took a great leap forward in 1967, when Bart Starr led the Green Bay Packers to a win over the Kansas City Chiefs at the Los Angeles Coliseum in the first Super Bowl.
The 60s were defined by three assassinations: President John F. Kennedy, civil rights leader Martin Luther Kind, and Senator Robert Kennedy, who in 1968 was making his own run at president. After winning the California primary and giving a victory speech at L.A.’s Ambassador hotel, RFK was fatally shot by Sirhan Sirhan. Seventeen-year-old busboy Juan Romero, who had just shaken Kennedy’s hand, registered the shock of a nation.
The following story comes from the introduction to LIFE’s special issue, Cats: Companions in Life.
One morning, some years ago when I was living in New York City, I gathered Kaya into an old blue shawl and carried him eight blocks to the animal clinic to be put to sleep. He had been my cat since I was in the ninth grade. I named him after the Bob Marley album. “Nineteen years is a long time for a domestic short hair,” the vet said, stroking him.
Kaya still had a little life in him at the end. On the walk over to the clinic he batted at my chin from inside his wrap. I talked to him matter-of-factly, telling him about a recent CNN/New York Times poll that had voted him one of the seven best cats in the Northeast. I often told him things like this over the years: my version of coochy-coochy-coo.
Kaya always tolerated the stuff about the polls, though he must have known he wasn’t all that. Not compared to his brother Korduroy, anyway. Korduroy did things you’d tell people about. He would stand in the road near the STOP sign, for example, and when a car pulled up, he’d jump on the hood and peer into the windshield. Kaya would watch this impassively, and he also looked on when Korduroy engaged in elaborate play-fighting games with the neighbor’s German shepherd. Next to Korduroy, a skilled small-game hunter who knocked on our front door by putting a paw into the mail-slot, Kaya seemed a simpleton.
He was docile and deliberate and he purred a lot. He didn’t much go for killing things but he got into sudden, spirited battles with ball-point pens and dangling extension cords. He had white mittens on his front paws, white knee-length stockings on his hind legs, and soft snowy fur around his muzzle, neck, and breast. Otherwise he was cloaked in a hodgepodge of blacks and browns. He had wide, yellow-green eyes. He lay down a lot.
Among me and my immediate family we’ve had maybe a dozen cats over the years—not including the eight kittens that once roamed my parents’ house after Palaleela had her litter—and there is no question that in matters of decency and kindness Kaya was the best of the lot. He let Korduroy eat first. He put up with two-year-olds who tugged his tail. He kept you company. Many cats are keen to human suffering, but none was keener than Kaya. When someone was sad, Kaya always came around. “Mow,” he’d say, and look up at you.
Kaya appreciated
good, simple things: being brushed with a fine comb, warm chicken scraps, a
scratch behind the ears, weekends on the Cape, a place to sleep at the foot of
the bed. How often do we celebrate the life of a cat?
Maybe it was because he didn’t know any tricks that in the last few years of his life, Kaya began to talk. He mewed incessantly. His most common issuance was a loud, plaintive wail that sounded more like a human baby than any animal I’ve heard. “Dude, you’ve got a kid over there?” friends would say during phone conversations. My professional acquaintances knew him too. I’d be interviewing someone, and when Kaya’s voice filled the phone lines I’d sense the person on the other end ignoring it uncomfortably. “I know,” I’d say to Kaya afterward, “it can be hard to be a cat.”
Kaya delivered other
sounds besides that trademark yowl. He had a two-beat high-pitched me-ow for
when he was playing happily or anticipating food. He gave a short, chirplike
mew as a greeting when he walked into a room. His long trilling mew meant he
wanted to go out. A low, guttural “reowwl” said he was encountering another
cat. An airy half-mew, half-yawn meant he was waking up, and Kaya’s odd,
unnerving series of yips told you he sensed a thunderstorm on its way. Whatever
Kaya’s agenda, the only sure way to quiet him was to take him onto your lap.
The mewing became a backdrop to my life that did not fade until the very end. When I made the appointment at the clinic, Kaya had been sick for several weeks. Thyroid condition. He slept nearly all the time and he couldn’t keep his medicine down. He stopped jumping up onto the bed at night. He kept to a corner of the apartment, venturing out every few hours to stare into his water dish and take a few half-hearted laps. When his mewing died down, a strange silence settled upon the apartment. Around that time he stopped eating.
It got to me, of course. I tried to tempt him with his favorite foods. Friends came over to tell Kaya good-bye. The night before we went to the clinic I was sitting on the couch—quiet, glum, and staring off. I guess Kaya could tell I was in a rotten way. I looked down when I felt him rubbing weakly against my shins. He peered up at me. “Mow,” he said, and then he slumped back over to the corner to rest.
The next morning I
carried him in the crook of my arm. I talked to him as if nothing were wrong.
At the clinic I set him on a table in a small greenish room and stroked him
until I could feel a faint purr in his breast. The vet was there too, and Kaya,
with what seemed like great effort, gave a final, soft meow.
His life was gentle, I tell people, and you could have learned from him.
Brownie drank milk straight from the cow as Blackie waited his turn at a dairy farm in Fresno, Calif., in 1953.
Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
It looks like this dog, cat and mouse were considering acting out the food chain, but this was in fact a friendly gathering of the household pets of the Lyng family in Denmark, 1955.
Jytte Bjerregaard Muller/The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock
This Siamese cat escaped up a pole in Carlsbad, N.M. in 1962, and hoped the cocker spaniel in pursuit would obey the sign.
Bettmann/Shutterstock
Sometimes cats and dogs do get along.
Chris Swanda/EyeEm/Shutterstock
Diana wrote in her diary at the desk in her sitting room in Kensington Palace.
DenisNata/Shutterstock
Oscar, a hospice cat, who had an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients were going to die, walked past an activity room at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, R.I. David Dosa profiled Oscar in his 2011 book, “Making Rounds With Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat.
Stew Milne/AP/REX/Shutterstock
Scarlett the cat, whose eyes were singed shut after saving her kittens during a building fire, snuggled with her new owner, writer Karen Wellen in 1997; Scarlett’s eyes healed.
Taro Yamasaki/The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock
The pattern is sickeningly familiar. A new and deadly strain of flu emerges in Asia, then spreads across the world and comes to the United States. A pandemic is declared.
In 2020 the world was shaken by COVID-19, which began infecting people in Wuhan, China in late December 2019 and spread to exert its deadly touch in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere.
In 1957 the new virus was first reported in Singapore, in February of that year, and then worked its way to Hong Kong. In June the disease had made its way to America.
In its Sept. 2, 1957 issue, LIFE reported on the race to develop a vaccine against this flu before the arrival of fall, which would make people more prone to respiratory illnesses: “For the first time in its history the U.S. has had full warning that it faces a major new epidemic.”
LIFE in that issue declared that “the government has launched the fastest medical mobilization ever attempted against an epidemic disease,” and the race for the cure began that April 1957, when forward-looking researchers from Walter Reed first began to work on developing a vaccine. The first of the photos here, which accompanied the Sept. 2 story, documented the fascinating process by which the vaccine was created, with the isolated virus being injected into an egg. After the virus multiplied inside the shell, the embryonic fluid was drawn out, the virus was killed, and the treated fluid was used as the vaccine.
The first batches of the vaccine were released while the weather was still warm, in late August and early September. The vaccine was produced quickly, but not enough to cover the entire population, and nor was it 100 percent effective. Unlike today with COVID-19, there was no mass quarantine or sheltering in place. As kids headed back to school, the number of flu patients began to multiply. In the Nov. 18 issue of LIFE, Surgeon General Leroy E. Burney predicted that “the epidemic will get worse in the next six weeks, and then decrease.”
Burney was correct, to a point. While this flu seemed to abate after Thanksgiving, it proved resurgent, and cases spiked again in early 1958. By the end, according to CDC statistics, the pandemic was tied to 110,000 deaths in the United States, and 1.1 million around the world.
Flu research was conducted at Great Lakes Naval Training Station.
Dr. Maurice Hillman of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research acquired flu specimens from Japan on April 18, before anyone in the U.S. was infected, and by May 18, his team had the virus isolated. He then gave the virus to six drug firms to develop a vaccine.
Creating the flu vaccine involved injecting the virus into eggs, where it multiplied. The virus-laden embryonic fluid was then siphoned out, and the virus was killed. That purified fluid became the vaccine. In this photo Jeff Cesarone at the Merck Sharp and Dohme plant in West Point, Pa.,explained the process.
Ask a fan of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women to identify a favorite moment in the book, and you might get any number of responses. There’s the time Jo accidentally singes the hair off her older sister, Meg, as she’s helping Meg prepare for a social engagement. Or the time young, artistic Amy accidentally plasters herself into a bucket as she’s attempting to make a cast of her foot. There are the amateur dramatic productions the sisters stage inside their humble home—swashbuckling tales of high adventure. And there are the comically combative encounters with their wealthy, outspoken Aunt March, who has no compunction about expressing her disapproval over their somewhat unconventional lifestyle.
Then there are the heartbreaking tragedies and daily hardships that befall the girls: death, for one thing, as well as the daunting challenges of marriage and motherhood, fraught relationships, and unrequited romantic love.
All of that and much more is brought to life in the beautiful special edition of LIFE, Little Women: A Story for Every Generation, which is available here. The issue revisits the roots of the Little Women story, explores the many wonderful incarnations of the story on film (and stage) and shows why the story remains as relevant today as it ever was.
Drawing inspiration from her own life with three sisters, Alcott—who was born in 1832 and lived in an environment of financial tenuousness, burgeoning philosophical ideas, and then the Civil War—presented an honest, insightful collection of anecdotes that chronicled the passage from adolescence into adulthood for these four girls (and their mother, Marmee), each of whom presented her own distinctive model of womanhood. With that, Alcott created a runaway best-seller—the book was written in two parts; the first installment was so successful when it was published in 1868 that Alcott quickly produced a follow-up that was released the next year.
Alcott also forever changed the landscape of literary fiction. Taking the inner lives of girls seriously at that time amounted to a revolutionary act, and her nuanced, sensitive depiction of each of the sisters is part of what has led to the book’s remarkable staying power. At the story’s heart is the rebellious Jo, an aspiring writer who resents the notion that she should marry and instead longs to pursue her creative passions; she remains indelible among literary heroines.
Jo’s hunger for life, her principled recalcitrance, and her determination to live on her own terms have resonated across the ages in ways the author could never have anticipated. Alcott has become the godmother of some of modern culture’s most significant voices: Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, J.K. Rowling, and numerous others. It’s rare to find a novel that has spoken so strongly to so many disparate thinkers.
The novel has touched every corner of American culture, inspiring books, movies, plays, operas, and various other sorts of interpretations and adaptations—including Oscar-nominated director and screenwriter Greta Gerwig’s new movie, with Saoirse Ronan in the role of Jo.
The story is beloved by readers around the world who have embraced Alcott’s deeply moral, emotionally complex tale, and many of whom have traveled to visit Orchard House, the Massachusetts home where she wrote Little Women. Today the house is a museum, a powerful time capsule of 19th-century life, and the fact that it continues to thrive is another testament to Alcott’s long-lasting appeal.
“It’s really about mothers, grandmothers, aunts, teachers, librarians passing this book down to the younger generation,” says Anne Boyd Rioux, a professor of English at the University of New Orleans and the author of 2018’s Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters. “It’s never been called the great American novel or anything like that, although it should be considered for that. Instead it’s been part of the underground, shadow canon, if you will, for female writers. It’s a book that’s been considered a rite of passage, I think, in growing up for girls. This is a book that will show you what your options are and to help you find yourself.”
If not for her own lineage, family life, and surroundings, Alcott might never have delivered such a compelling portrayal of life in the March household. Jo’s sisters and mother were fictionalized versions of Alcott’s own family. The fictional Mr. March and the real-life Amos Bronson Alcott, Louisa’s father, both had progressive attitudes toward women’s education and equality.
“Louisa was, by nature, a fighter whose rebellious spirit pervades Little Women,” says Eve LaPlante, the author of Marmee & Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother as well as a cousin of Louisa May Alcott’s and a great niece of Louisa’s mother, Abigail. “Louisa hated the limitations placed on her as a girl. She wanted to run; girls weren’t allowed. She wanted an education; only her male friends and cousins got that. She wanted to enlist to fight in the Civil War; women weren’t allowed. She wanted to vote . . . The list goes on. I think all that pain was funneled into Little Women, a cry of the heart fueled by Louisa’s desire to change things, to reform the world.”
Raised with the foundational belief that women were equal to men and just as entitled to speak their minds and follow their hearts, Louisa evangelized her feminist philosophy to anyone she encountered, and imbued that message into her most enduring narrative. Little Women encourages us all to live up to our potential, to pursue our dreams, and to embrace life to the fullest, no matter the obstacles we encounter—and reminds us to always, always hold close the ones we love.
Writing circa 1878 to a reader who had written to her seeking guidance, Alcott responded: “I can only say to you as I do to the many young writers who ask for advice—there is no easy road to successful authorship; it has to be earned by long and patient labor, many disappointments, uncertainties and trials. We all have our own life to pursue, Our own kind of dream to be weaving . . . And we all have the power To make wishes come true, As long as we keep believing.” — From Gina McIntyre’s introduction to Little Women: A Story for Every Generation.
The frontispiece of the first edition of Little Women from 1868 featured an illustration by May Alcott.
Courtesy Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House
The Alcotts in 1865. Louisa is seated on the ground, while her mother, Abigail May Alcott, stands with her eldest daughter, Anna Alcott Pratt, Anna’s son Frederick in the stroller, and Bronson Alcott. This is the only existing image that shows most of the family together.
Courtesy Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House
Screen adaptations of Alcott’s book are numerous. The 1933 film version of Little Women, directed by George Cukor, featured (left to right): Katharine Hepburn as Jo, Joan Bennett as Amy, Frances Dee as Meg, and Jean Parker as Beth.
Snap/Shutterstock
Jo (June Allyson) and Laurie (Peter Lawford) spent time in her attic In the 1949 film version.
Courtesy Everett
In the 1994 film version of Little Women, Winona Ryder starred as Jo, with Gabriel Byrne playing Professor Bhaer.
Joseph Lederer/Di Novi/Columbia/Kobal/Shutterstock
Mr Laurence (Michael Gambon) danced with Aunt March (Angela Lansbury) in a 2018 adaptation that aired on PBS.
