Amos Bronson Alcott

He married Abby May, sister of an American reformer, Samuel Joseph May, on May 22, 1830 without the consent of his family. Joseph performed their marriage ceremony at King's Chapel.

They were blessed with four daughters; Anna Bronson Alcott (1831), Louisa May Alcott (1832), Elizabeth Sewall Alcott (1835) and May Alcott (1840). Their only son was born in 1839, but lived only a few minutes.

His daughter Elizabeth May Alcott, died in 1858, at the age of 22, after contracting scarlet fever. His youngest daughter, May Alcott, a respected artist, died shortly after giving birth to her daughter in 1879.

He was born on November 29, 1799 in Wolcott, Connecticut, to Joseph Chatfield Alcott, an uneducated farmer and his wife, Anna Bronson Alcott. He was the oldest child in the family of eight children.

His small rural town had only a one-room schoolhouse that taught basic reading and writing. He left the school at the age of 10.

At the age of 13, his uncle, Reverend Tillotson Bronson, offered to educate and prepare him for college, but he abandoned his uncle’s house after one month and relied on self-education thereafter.

Initially, he worked for a well-known clockmaker at the age of 15. When he was 17, he earned his teaching certificate but, upon finding no suitable positions, instead became a traveling salesmen in the American South.

Life as a peddler brought in a small income, but he began to worry about its effect on his soul. In 1823, he returned to Connecticut in debt and found a teaching job with the aid of his Uncle Tillotson.

He quickly developed a new style of teaching and renovated his school for the comfort of his pupils. The unorthodox strategies he practiced were greeted with skepticism, and he moved to several different cities such as Bristol, Boston and then to Germantown in search of a more receptive community, but was unsuccessful in his attempt.

In 1834, he opened a school in Boston with 30 students, mostly from wealthy families. Due to his unconventional teaching policies and eccentric religious beliefs, which he imparted to his students, parents removed their children from the school and the school was shut down.

His string of failures were capped when he admitted an African American student into his later ‘parlor school’ and refused to expel him on protests of the parents.

He was one of the earliest and most prominent vegans, even before the term was coined. He advocated that diet held the key to human perfection and connected physical well-being to mental improvement.

In 1834, he established the first ‘progressive school’ in America, Temple School. He avoided orthodox punishment for students and encouraged conversationalist style for educating them. His teaching style would later be widely adopted, as would his stances on race and women's rights.