Louisa May Alcott

What failed

Her father's utopian commune collapsed over the winter of 1843 and left the family destitute. She went out to domestic service at eighteen and lasted seven weeks, starved and frozen. Her first book earned thirty-two dollars. She put aside a novel called Success after less than a month. A kindergarten she opened ended in a debt of forty dollars she planned to settle by selling her hair. A publisher lost one of her stories and would not pay for it. And the publisher she showed her work to told her, in her own record of it, to stick to her teaching because she could not write.

What happened next

Her journal records what she said back: I won't teach; and I can write, and I'll prove it. Six years later she took a commission she did not want, sent in twelve chapters her publisher thought dull, and agreed with him. Little Women paid off every debt the family had.

The point

There is a coda. In 1871 she repaid the forty dollars, and by her account the man who had told her she could not write laughed and owned that he had made a mistake. She kept both halves of it in the same journal — the insult and the receipt.