Louisa May Alcott was an American novelist best known as author of the novel Little Women and its sequels Little Men and Jo's Boys. Along with Elizabeth Stoddard, Rebecca Harding Davis, Anne Moncure Crane, and others, she was part of a group of female authors during the Gilded Age, who addressed women's issues in a modern and candid manner. Their works were, as one newspaper columnist of the period commented, 'among the decided 'signs of the times'