Hospital Sketches and Camp and Fireside Stories.

ALCOTT, Louisa May.

$275.00

Item Number: 132793

Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1890.

Later printing of this compilation of four sketches based on letters Louisa May Alcott sent home during the six weeks she spent as a volunteer nurse for the Union Army during the American Civil War in Georgetown. Octavo, original cloth, illustrated, tissue-guarded frontispiece. In fine condition.

While serving as a nurse during the Civil War in Georgetown, Alcott wrote several letters to her family in Concord. At the urging of others, she prepared them for publication, slightly altering and fictionalizing them. The narrator of the stories was renamed Tribulation Periwinkle but the sketches are virtually authentic to Alcott's real experiences. Alcott was approached by Thomas Niles, an up-and-coming employee of Roberts Brothers, to publish the sketches in book form. Instead, she turned to the more established publisher James Redpath, who paid her $40 for the book. Fourteen years later after its publication, Alcott reflected on avoiding Roberts Brothers, who later published Little Women (1868): "Shortsighted Louisa! Little did you dream that this same Roberts Brothers were to help you make your fortune a few years later." After that novel's success, Niles offered to republish Hospital Sketches under the Roberts Brothers imprint, and Alcott slightly expanded it.