2023 Summer Conversational Series

When A Modern Mephistopheles (1877) was first published by Roberts Brothers for the No Name Series, readers were stumped as to the identity of the author.   No one suspected that the person who penned this intriguing tale of good and evil, based on Goethe’s Faust, could possibly be Louisa May Alcott, who was best known for her children’s books, including, of course, the classic Little Women.

Few of Alcott’s devoted readers knew the scope of her interest in the raging forces within a human soul that could bring someone to the brink of insanity or harbor the will to cause chaos and destruction.   She not only explored the dichotomy of good and evil in human nature through her “blood-and-thunder” tales — many written under a pseudonym — but touched upon that topic in aspects of her children’s literature as well.