Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist. She is best known for the novel Little Women, published in 1868. This novel is loosely based on her childhood experiences with her three sisters. Alcott was a daughter of noted Transcendentalist Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail May Alcott. Louisa's father started the Temple School; her uncle, Samuel Joseph May, was a noted abolitionist. Though of New England parentage and residence, she was born in Germantown, which is currently part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She had three sisters: one elder (Anna Pratt Alcott) and two younger (Elizabeth Sewall Alcott and May Alcott). The family moved to Boston in 1834 or 1835, where her father established an experimental school and joined the Transcendental Club with Emerson and Thoreau. During her childhood and early adulthood, she shared her family's poverty and Transcendentalist ideals. In 1840, after several setbacks with the school, her family moved to a cottage on two acres along the Sudbury River in Concord, Massachusetts. The Alcott family moved to the Utopian Fruitlands community for a brief interval in 1843-1844, and then after its collapse to rented rooms, and subsequently a house in Concord purchased with her mother's inheritance and help from Emerson. Alcott's early education had included lessons from the naturalist Henry David Thoreau but had chiefly been in the hands of her father. She also received some instruction from writers and educators such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller, who were all family friends. She later described these early years in a newspaper sketch entitled "Transcendental Wild Oats", afterwards reprinted in the volume Silver Pitchers (1876), which relates the experiences of her family during their experiment in "plain living and high thinking" at Fruitlands. As she grew older, she developed as both an abolitionist and a feminist. In 1847, the family housed a fugitive slave for one week; in 1848 Alcott read and admired the "Declaration of Sentiments" published by the Seneca Falls Convention on women's rights. Due to the family's poverty, she began work at an early age as an occasional teacher, seamstress, governess, domestic helper, and writer — her first book was Flower Fables (1854), tales originally written for Ellen Emerson, daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1860, Alcott began writing for the Atlantic Monthly, and she was nurse in the Union Hospital at Georgetown, D.C., for six weeks in 1862-1863. Her letters home, revised and published in the Commonwealth and collected as Hospital Sketches (1863, republished with additions in 1869), garnered her first critical recognition for her observations and humor. Her novel Moods (1864), was also promising. A lesser-known part of her work are the passionate, fiery novels and stories she wrote, usually under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard. These works, such as A Long Fatal Love Chase and Pauline's Passion and Punishment, were known in the Victorian Era as "potboilers" or "blood-and-thunder tales." Her character Jo in "Little Women" publishes several such stories but ultimately rejects them after being told that they are "dangerous for little minds." Their protagonists are willful and relentless in their pursuit of their own aims, which often include revenge on those who have humiliated or thwarted them. These works achieved immediate commercial success and remain highly readable today.

1. ULYSSES by James Joyce 2. THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald 3. A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce 4. LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov 5. BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley 6. THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner 7. CATCH-22 8. DARKNESS AT NOON by Arthur Koestler 9. SONS AND LOVERS by D.H. Lawrence 10. THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck 11. UNDER THE VOLCANO by Malcolm Lowry 12. THE WAY OF ALL FLESH by Samuel Butler 13. 1984 by George Orwell 14. I, CLAUDIUS by Robert Graves 15. TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf 16. AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY by Theodore Dreiser 17. THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers 18. SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE by Kurt Vonnegut 19. INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison 20. NATIVE SON by Richard Wright 21. HENDERSON THE RAIN KING by Saul Bellow 22. APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA by John O'Hara 23. U.S.A. (trilogy) by John Dos Passos 24. WINESBURG, OHIO by Sherwood Anderson 25. A PASSAGE TO INDIA by E.M. Forster 26. THE WINGS OF THE DOVE by Henry James 27. THE AMBASSADORS by Henry James 28. TENDER IS THE NIGHT by F. Scott Fitzgerald 29. THE STUDS LONIGAN TRILOGY by James T. Farrell 30. THE GOOD SOLDIER by Ford Madox Ford 31. ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell 32. THE GOLDEN BOWL by Henry James 33. SISTER CARRIE by Theodore Dreiser 34. A HANDFUL OF DUST by Evelyn Waugh 35. AS I LAY DYING by William Faulkner 36. ALL THE KING'S MEN by Robert Penn Warren 37. THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by Thornton Wilder 38. HOWARDS END by E.M. Forster 39. GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN by James Baldwin 40. THE HEART OF THE MATTER by Graham Greene 41. LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding 42. DELIVERANCE by James Dickey 43. A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME (series) by Anthony Powell 44. POINT COUNTER POINT by Aldous Huxley 45. THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway 46. THE SECRET AGENT by Joseph Conrad 47. NOSTROMO by Joseph Conrad 48. THE RAINBOW by D.H. Lawrence 49. WOMEN IN LOVE by D.H. Lawrence 50. TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller 51. THE NAKED AND THE DEAD by Norman Mailer 52. PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT by Philip Roth 53. PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov 54. LIGHT IN AUGUST by William Faulkner 55. ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac 56. THE MALTESE FALCON by Dashiell Hammett 57. PARADE'S END by Ford Madox Ford 58. THE AGE OF INNOCENCE by Edith Wharton 59. ZULEIKA DOBSON by Max Beerbohm 60. THE MOVIEGOER by Walker Percy 61. DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by Willa Cather 62. FROM HERE TO ETERNITY by James Jones 63. THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLES by John Cheever 64. THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by J.D. Salinger 65. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE by Anthony Burgess 66. OF HUMAN BONDAGE by W. Somerset Maugham 67. HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad 68. MAIN STREET by Sinclair Lewis 69. THE HOUSE OF MIRTH by Edith Wharton 70. THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET by Lawrence Durell 71. A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA by Richard Hughes 72. A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS by V.S. Naipaul 73. THE DAY OF THE LOCUST by Nathanael West 74. A FAREWELL TO ARMS by Ernest Hemingway 75. SCOOP by Evelyn Waugh 76. THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE by Muriel Spark 77. FINNEGANS WAKE by James Joyce 78. KIM by Rudyard Kipling 79. A ROOM WITH A VIEW by E.M. Forster 80. BRIDESHEAD REVISITED by Evelyn Waugh 81. THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH by Saul Bellow 82. ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner 83. A BEND IN THE RIVER by V.S. Naipaul 84. THE DEATH OF THE HEART by Elizabeth Bowen 85. LORD JIM by Joseph Conrad 86. RAGTIME by E.L. Doctorow 87. THE OLD WIVES' TALE by Arnold Bennett 88. THE CALL OF THE WILD by Jack London 89. LOVING by Henry Green 90. MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie 91. TOBACCO ROAD by Erskine Caldwell 92. IRONWEED by William Kennedy 93. THE MAGUS by John Fowles 94. WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys 95. UNDER THE NET by Iris Murdoch 96. SOPHIE'S CHOICE by William Styron 97. THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles 98. THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE by James M. Cain 99. THE GINGER MAN by J.P. Donleavy 100. THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS by Booth Tarkington

Children take great pleasure in listening to stories, and there are some terrific books on CD . You'll find that these books not only provide you with an occasional break from reading (and rereading the same stories again and again); they also enrich your child's multi-sensory experiences with books. Hearing a book read on CD helps a child see how the words on the page can come alive in a fluid, expressive way. It helps her focus on the sounds of words read without interruption and provides a model of fluent reading. Audio books also give her an important introduction to listening — a skill that she must master in order to learn to read. Many books on CD have interesting sound effects, music, and multiple narrators that are especially motivating and fun for young children. Narrators on CD tend to embellish their storytelling with silly voices and dramatic enhancements. They emphasize reading as a source of pleasure rather than a skill, and make children eager to learn how to read. Beyond their sheer enjoyment of audio books, children also develop a sense of narrative structure and understanding of language. Stories on CD help them to grasp the rich and various ways in which language distills and conveys meaning. In addition, exposing your child to a range of narrators and their different styles of reading will deepen his grasp of the reading process. Teachers often set up a listening center so that two to four children can listen to the same book at the same time. This can provide a wonderful opportunity for children to hear their favorite books read aloud again and again. The more they listen, the greater the likelihood that they will learn new vocabulary words. And, when listening with a special friend, the opportunities for playing creatively and acting out parts of the story are endless.

In 1931 the Congress established the talking-book program, which was intended to help blind adults who couldn't read print. This program was called ``Books for the Adult Blind Project``. The American Foundation for the Blind developed first talking books in 1932. One year later the first reproduction machine began the process of mass publishing. By 1935, after Congress approved free mailings of audio books to blind citizens, the Books for the Adult Blind Project was in full operation. In 1992 the National Library Service (NLS) for Blind and Physically Handicapped network circulated millions of recorded books to more than 700,000 handicapped listeners. All NLS recordings were created by professionals.