Louisa May Alcott, who wrote “Little Women” in 1868, spent the Civil War years in Washington as a volunteer for the Christian Commission, a group that supported wartime chaplains and soldiers in the field and hospitals.

After the war, Alcott wrote many stories for girls and earned enough to allow her transcendentalist, abolitionist father Bronson Alcott to live comfortably in Concord, Mass. Unfortunately, exhausted by overwork, she survived her father by only two days.

Source: Reveille in Washington by Margaret Leech