On March 22, 1927, the New York Times printed the results of a poll of high-school students who had been asked, “What book has interested you most?” The respondents overwhelmingly chose Little Women as their favorite, as the book that had most influenced them, surpassing even the Bible, which stalled at the number two position. Pause a moment to absorb this: Fifty-eight years after its publication in full, Louisa May Alcott’s domestic novel Little Women bore more influence on the lives and thought processes of American high-school students than did the Bible. Little Women, as John Lennon would claim of the Beatles forty years later, was more popular than Jesus. Although one may want to interpret this poll primarily as an indication of the increasingly secular interests of twentieth-century American youth, one must allow that, with all the other choices of reading matter available, beating out the Bible is clearly a tremendous feat. As related proof of Little Women’s influence, John Bunyan’s unusual 1684 religious allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress – which is the March family’s favorite book and guide to life in Little Women, and which provides an organizing framework for Alcott’s novel – came in at number three in the poll. I do believe Bunyan must thank Louisa May Alcott for his book’s second wind.
In remarking that Little Women has been an incredibly popular text, a commentator risks making a gigantic understatement. Part one of the novel, released on September 30, 1868, sold out its first print run in four weeks (at $1.25 a book – some sources note that the price was jacked up to $1.50 after the book’s ability to sell had been proved), though its generally positive early reviews had not yet labeled the story a must-read. Part two, released on April 14, 1869, also sold out quickly, even with the dramatic increase in its initial print run. In 1932, a few years after the novel went into the public domain (meaning that any publishing firm could print it), its long-authorized publisher, Boston’s Little, Brown and Company, reported having sold a total of more than 1,500,000 copies since 1898 – thirty years after the book was first published. Little Women was also an international phenomenon. Publishers’ Weekly noted in 1929 that, in addition to its longstanding popularity in England, Little Women had been translated into French, German, Dutch, Greek, and Chinese (it was a favored Chinese New Year gift). By 1969, one hundred years after the publication of the full text, the list of translations included Arabic, Bengali, Indonesian, Irish, Japanese, Russian, Swedish, and Urdu. On a more personal level, by the end of 1869 Louisa May Alcott had attained clear celebrity status at age thirty-six; her widespread fame far surpassed that of her well-known philosopher father, Amos Bronson Alcott (just as the first part of Little Women had far outsold his own 1868 offering, an essay collection called Tablets).
