Little Women is a coming-of-age novel written by American novelist Louisa May Alcott, originally published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869 at the request of her publisher. The story follows the lives of the four March sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy—and details their passage from childhood to womanhood. Loosely based on the lives of the author and her three sisters,? it is classified as an autobiographical or semi-autobiographical novel.

Little Women is an outstanding achievement of nineteenth-century American literature, and the first children’s novel written in the United States to have become an enduring classic.