"Backgrounds and Contexts" includes a wealth of archival materials, among them previously unpublished correspondence with Thomas Niles and Alcott's own precursors to Little Women . "Criticism" reprints twenty nineteenth-century reviews. Seven modern essays represent a variety of critical theories used to read and study the novel, including feminist (Catharine R. Stimpson, Elizabeth Keyser), new historicist (Richard H. Brodhead), psychoanalytic (Angela M. Estes and Kathleen Margaret Lant), and reader-response (Barbara Sicherman). A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included. Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) is a much beloved author of American literature, in particular the Little Women trilogy, centered on the semiautobiographical March family ( Little Women , Little Men , and Jo's Boys ). Best known in her time for Little Women , An Old-Fashioned Girl , and Little Men , her obituary in the New York Times declared, "There was probably no writer among women better loved by the young than she." Gregory Eiselein is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English, where he teaches American Literature. He is the author of Literature and Humanitarian Reform in the Civil War Era and editor of Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems and Other Writings and Adah Isaacs Menken: Infelicia and Other Writings . With Anne K. Phillips, he coedited The Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia . Anne K. Phillips is Associate Professor of English at Kansas State University where she teaches Children's Literature and American Literature. She is coauthor of Resources for Teaching the Bedford Introduction to Literature and coeditor of the annual Children's Literature 21. With Gregory Eiselein, she coedited The Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia .