Jo’s Boys and How They Turned Out

Taking place ten years after Little Men, Jo’s Boys and How They Turned Out, by Louisa May Alcott, is the third and final book in the Little Women trilogy. Originally published in 1886, two years before Ms. Alcott’s death, Jo’s Boys follows the lives of the young men readers came to love and cherish in its prequel. In it, we learn the fates of Jo’s sons Rob and Teddy, along with the other boys at Plumfield Estate School. Written in classic Alcott style, we see how the boys struggle to overcome their many flaws, in the end learning life’s lessons the hard way. Just as the March girls did, each boy must learn to deal with death, love, heartbreak, and the consequences of their actions. Readers will feel pain and joy along side each young man as he completes his life journey and fulfills his dreams in this classic conclusion to one of America’s most beloved series.LOUISA MAY ALCOTT (1832-1888), one of the most well-known American novelists of the 19th century, was born on November 29, 1832 to transcendentalist educator Amos Bronson Alcott and his wife, Abigail May Alcott. She was the second of four sisters (like Jo, her literary corollary), and grew up in a family that encouraged and sympathized with her abolitionist and feminist leanings. As a child she received instruction from noted literary figures such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, all family friends. In addition to the Little Women series, which included four novels, she wrote 28 other works, three under the pen name A.M Barnard. Though Alcott had chronic health problems in her later years, most likely attributed to an autoimmune disease, she continued to write until her death at 55 in 1888.