Penguin Christmas Classics
1 primary work • 2 total works
Book 2
Louisa May Alcott's enchanting Christmas stories, presented in a beautiful hardcover edition perfect for giving as a gift.
A Merry Christmas collects the best holiday stories of Louisa May Alcott, from the yuletide festivities of Marmee and her 'little women' to the moving 'What Love Can Do'. Deeply influenced by real-life events, including characters based on Alcott's family members and drawing from her experiences participating in the suffrage and abolitionist movements, these stories have the authentic texture and detail of Christmas in nineteenth-century America.
Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1832. Her family later moved to Concord, Massachusetts, where Alcott was influenced by their neighbours Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. At a young age, Louisa took on some of the family's financial burdens, working as a domestic, a teacher, and a writer. In 1868 and 1869, fame and fortune came with the publication of Little Women. The author of many novels and an active campaigner for temperance and women's suffrage, Alcott died in 1888.
Penguin Christmas Classics 6-Volume Boxed Set
by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, L. Frank Baum, Louisa May Alcott, Nikolay Gogol, and E.T.A. Hoffmann
The six volumes in the Penguin Christmas Classics are not only our most beloved Christmas tales, they also have given us much of what we love about the holiday itself. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol revived in Victorian England such Christmas hallmarks as the Christmas tree, holiday cards, and caroling. The Yuletide yarns of Anthony Trollope, brought together in Christmas at Thompson Hall and Other Christmas Stories, popularized throughout the British Empire and around the world the trappings of Christmas in London. L. Frank Baum’s The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus created the origin story for the presiding spirit of Christmas as we know it. The holiday tales of Louisa May Alcott, collected in A Merry Christmas and Other Christmas Stories, shaped the ideal of an American Christmas. Nikolai Gogol’s The Night Before Christmas brought forth some of our earliest Christmas traditions as passed down through folk tales. And E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker inspired the most famous ballet in history, one seen by millions in the twilight of every year.
Beautifully designed hardcovers—with foil-stamped jackets, decorative endpapers, and nameplates for personalization—in a small trim size that makes them perfect stocking stuffers, Penguin Christmas Classics embody the spirit of giving that is at the heart of our most time-honored stories about the holiday.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.