Helping to support her family for most of her life, novelist Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) was born on this day in Germantown, Pennsylvania and raised in Massachusetts, the second of four daughters.

"It takes people a long time to learn the difference between talent and genius, especially ambitious young men and women," she wrote.

Tutored by her father's transcendentalist friends Ralph Waldo Emerson andHenry David Thoreau, Alcott was a nurse in a Union hospital during the Civil War. She is best known for Little Women (1868), the autobiographical and heartwarming story of Jo March and her family.

"Paid up all the debts . . . thank the Lord!" young Miss Alcott wrote in her journal about the novel's success.

"Stories of the heart are what live in the memory and when...you move the reader to tears you have won them to you forever."

She created other similar stories,with rich imagination and sentimentality-- An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870); Little Men (1871); Jo's Boys (1886) and others.

Alcott was an advocate for women's suffrage and other reforms. She once said, "Make each day useful and cheerful and prove that you know the worth of time by employing it well. Then youth will be happy, old age without regret, and life a beautiful success."

Shake it up.