tle success. Alcott wrote the story of the March's at the request of her editor who wanted her to write a "story for girls."
             The story was written quickly as she based the character, Jo March, on herself. Alcott set the novel in Concord Massachusetts, and many of the characters throughout the novel represented people that she had encountered throughout her own life, including her own family. While the book is highly autobiographical and the experiences of the March family parallel her own experiences with her own three sisters, many elements of the novel are highly fictionalized.
             The novel opens with the introduction of the four March girls. The two youngest, Beth and Amy are just about to enter their adolescence while Meg and Jo are both teenagers. They are in the midst of the Civil War and their father who is a chaplain in the Union Army is away from home, as he is for most of the novel. They are a poor family, and at times, the struggle to deal with poverty in a neighborhood where many of their f
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