Itzhak Perlman: American Masters

Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women

Season 22, Episode 7 of 8

The author of "Little Women" is an almost universally recognized name. Her reputation as a morally upstanding New England spinster, reflecting the conventional propriety of late 19th-century Concord, is firmly established. However, raised among reformers and Transcendentalists and skeptics, the intellectual protege of Emerson and Hawthorne and Thoreau, Alcott was actually a free thinker with democratic ideals and progressive values about women -- a worldly careerist of sorts. Most surprising is that she led, under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard, a literary double life, undiscovered until the 1940s. As Barnard, Alcott penned scandalous, sensational works with characters running the gamut from murderers and revolutionaries to cross-dressers and opium addicts -- a far cry from her familiar fatherly mentors, courageous mothers and appropriately impish children.

Previously Aired

Day
Time
Channel
12/28/2009
9 p.m.
12/29/2009
2 a.m.
3/2/2010
8 p.m.
3/3/2010
1 a.m.
3/9/2010
2 p.m.
4/9/2012
10 p.m.
3/16/2013
8 p.m.
3/18/2013
10 p.m.
3/29/2013
2:30 p.m.
12/7/2013
8 p.m.
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