The Abbot's Ghost

Louisa May Alcott, author of the classic novel, Little Women, was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania on November 29, 1832 to Amos Bronson and Abigail May Alcott. Alcott died on March 6, 1888, two days after the death of her father. She was fifty-six. She was buried on "Author's Ridge" near her family, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. By the time of her death, her book sales had exceeded one million copies, a remarkable tally in that time. She had earned $200,000 for her work. One hundred years after her death, she still had books on the best seller lists. Stephen Hines has published both fiction and poetry but is best known as a "literary prospector" who has brought back forgotten works by famous children's author Laura Ingalls Wilder, and works by Louisa May Alcott, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. His researches have taken him from the Herbert Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa, to correspondence with British researchers dealing with the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the United Kingdom. More than half a million copies of books he has collected and edited are in print, and he has had three bestsellers: Little House in the Ozarks, "I Remember Laura", and The Quiet Little Woman. He continues to write fiction and poetry and has been a newspaper humor columnist for seven years.