Who wrote March, the 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel inspired by Little Women?

Geraldine Brooks wrote March, the 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel inspired by Little Women.

Published in 2005, March imagines the experiences of Mr. March, the absent father in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Brooks places him among abolitionists and formerly enslaved people during the American Civil War, while also exploring his difficult marriage and the moral compromises created by war.

The novel is not a retelling of Little Women from the daughters’ perspective. Instead, it supplies a parallel narrative for a character Alcott largely kept offstage. Brooks draws on Alcott’s family history, especially her father Bronson Alcott’s reformist beliefs, while creating a fictional wartime biography.

March won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2006. Its award is sometimes confused with the recognition of Alcott’s original novel, but Little Women never won a Pulitzer because the award was established decades after Alcott’s death. Brooks’s book stands independently while deliberately engaging with that classic.