Editing Louisa May Alcott (section)

== Germantown Birth ==

Louisa May Alcott was born on November 29, 1832, in Germantown, then a community northwest of Philadelphia that would later be incorporated into the city. Her father Amos Bronson Alcott, the transcendentalist educator and philosopher, was attempting one of his experimental schools in the area when Louisa was born. Her mother Abigail May brought New England reform traditions to the household that Louisa would later dramatize in fiction. The family's Philadelphia period was brief, Bronson Alcott's educational experiments leading them back to Boston by 1834.<ref name="matteson">{{cite book |last=Matteson |first=John |title=Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father |year=2007 |publisher=W.W. Norton |location=New York}}</ref>

Her Philadelphia birth, though followed by only two years of residence, placed her origin in a city whose literary traditions differed from the New England transcendentalism that would shape her childhood. The circumstance of her Germantown arrival—her father's idealistic educational venture that would soon fail—established patterns that her youth would repeat. The intellectual ferment that surrounded her birth, even in Philadelphia, anticipated the environment in which she would develop as a writer.<ref name="reisen"/>

Her subsequent life in Boston and Concord, where her father's friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau placed her among transcendentalism's central figures, shaped the writer she became. But Philadelphia could claim her first breath, her earliest days, and the beginning of a life whose literary achievement would place her among American letters' most influential figures. The city's connection to her, though brief, remains biographical fact that her Concord associations have not erased.<ref name="matteson"/>