Thread by @AdrienneLaF

Good morning! I’ve been digging into Louisa May Alcott’s history with @TheAtlantic and this story is too good not to share. (1/15)

@TheAtlantic In 1861, Alcott submitted a manuscript to The Atlantic called “How I Went Out to Service,” a fictionalized account of her own (weird, short-lived) experience as a servant. (2/15)

@TheAtlantic The editor at the time, James T. Fields, rejected it.

The Atlantic had previously published her work under the magazine’s founding editor James Russell Lowell. Here’s a modern Cinderella story she wrote for the October 1860 issue, for example:
theatlantic.com/magazine/archi… (3/15)

Fields was less interested in Alcott’s work. He wrote to her: “Stick to your teaching, Miss Alcott. You can’t write,” and gave her an unsolicited (!) loan of $40 so she could set up a schoolhouse. (4/15)

Naturally, she was furious. Months later she was still thinking about the remark. “I won’t teach. I can write, and I’ll prove it,” she wrote in her journal. To friends she complained about The Atlantic being a “slow coach magazine.” (5/15)

Meanwhile, other magazines took notice. Alcott was publishing pulp fiction—tales of “blood and thunder” as she put it—in other popular monthlies and weeklies. Her career took off. (6/15)

In 1863, another abolitionist magazine published Alcott’s “Hospital Sketches,” inspired by her service as a nurse in the Army caring for Union soldiers in Washington, D.C. It was a sensation. Fields then sent word that he’d love to publish her after all. (7/15)

That fall, The Atlantic paid Alcott $10 to publish “Thoreau’s flute,” a poem she’d written after Henry David Thoreau’s death. “Of course I didn’t say no,” Alcott wrote of Fields’s newfound interest in her work. (8/15)

The poem was published anonymously (customary for poetry in The Atlantic at the time) and people assumed it was written by Ralph Waldo Emerson. (9/15)

(Sidenote: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow even stopped by the Alcott house with a copy of The Atlantic, raving about Emerson’s latest. As Longfellow began to read the poem aloud to Alcott’s father, he interrupted to say Louisa was in fact the author.)
theatlantic.com/magazine/archi… (10/15)

Five years later, in 1868, Alcott’s “Little Women” was published. It became one of the most successful books of all time, and has never been out of print. (11/15)

In 1871, a decade after Fields rejected her, Alcott wrote him a brief note and enclosed $40. (12/15)

“Dear Mr. Fields,
Once upon a time you lent me forty dollars, kindly saying that I might return them when I made a ‘pot of gold.’ As the miracle has been unexpectedly wrought I wish to fulfill my part of the bargain, I herewith repay my debt with many thanks.
L.M. Alcott”

Alcott later told Fields: “I found writing paid so much better than teaching that I thought I’d stick to my pen.” (14/15)

You can read more of her work for The Atlantic here: theatlantic.com/author/louisa-… (15/15)