Just five years before making her name with Little Women, Louisa May Alcott volunteered as a nurse during the Civil War. Though her service was brief, it deeply affected her tenuous relationship with her father, and inspired her commitment to abolitionism. Alcott kept a journal and wrote letters to her family and friends, which she later incorporated into her breakthrough book, Hospital Sketches. In this revelatory portrait, Samantha Seiple suggests that Alcott's time as an Army nurse helped her find her authentic voice, generating the power and pathos needed to create her most enduring novel.