Description

One of six beloved Christmas classics in collectible hardcover editions
 
A Merry Christmas collects the treasured holiday tales of Louisa May Alcott, from the dearly familiar Yuletide benevolence of Marmee and her “little women” to the timeless “What Love Can Do,” wherein the residents of a boarding house come together to make a lovely Christmas for two poor girls. Wildly popular at the time of their publication—readers deluged Alcott with letters demanding sequels—and drawing on Alcott’s family and experiences in the abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements, these stories have the authentic texture and detail of Christmas in nineteenth-century America, while their emphasis on generosity and charity make them timeless embodiments of the Christmas spirit.
 
Penguin Christmas Classics
 
Give the gift of literature this Christmas.
 
Penguin Christmas Classics honor the power of literature to keep on giving through the ages. The six volumes in the series are not only our most beloved Christmas tales, they also have given us much of what we love about the holiday itself. A Christmas Carol revived in Victorian England such Christmas hallmarks as the Christmas tree, holiday cards, and caroling. The Yuletide yarns of Anthony Trollope popularized throughout the British Empire and around the world the trappings of Christmas in London. 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 shaped the ideal of an American Christmas. The Night Before Christmas brought forth some of our earliest Christmas traditions as passed down through folk tales. And 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.
 
Collect all six Penguin Christmas Classics:
 
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Christmas at Thompson Hall: And Other Christmas Stories by Anthony Trollope
The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum
A Merry Christmas: And Other Christmas Stories by Louisa May Alcott
The Night Before Christmas by Nikolai Gogol
The Nutcracker by E. T. A. Hoffmann

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.

About the Author

Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1832, and grew up in Concord, Massachusetts. She was the second of four daughters of Abba May and Bronson Alcott, a prominent transcendentalist thinker and social reformer whose idealistic preoccupations caused him to neglect his family’s practical needs. Louisa began to shoulder her family’s financial burdens at a young age—as a domestic, as a teacher, and as a writer, producing everything from sketches of her Civil War nursing experiences to pseudonymous, lurid thrillers. Fame and fortune came with the publication of Little Women in 1868-1869, a novel based upon her childhood experiences. This was followed by other books in the Little Women Series, all of them enormously popular: An Old-Fashioned Girl in 1870, Little Men in 1871, Eight Cousins in 1875, its sequel, Rose in Bloom, in 1876, Under the Lilacs in 1878, Jack and Jill in 1880, and finally, in 1886, Jo’s Boys, the sequel to Little Men. Among her other books was the autobiographical novel Work: A Story of Experience in 1873. She was active in the women’s suffrage and temperance movements until her death in 1888.

John Matteson holds doctoral degrees from Harvard and Columbia Universities. He is a professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and is deputy director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography. Matteson is the author of The Lives of Margaret Fuller and Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father. For the latter book, he was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

J. T. Barbarese is the author of three books of poems, including A Very Small World, and a translation of Euripedes’ The Children of Heracles. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Boulevard, The Georgia Review, The Denver Quarterly, The Cortland Review and Poetry, and his literary journalism in numerous publications, from The Journal of Modern Literature to the New York Times. He is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Rutgers University, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in poetry, fiction, playwriting, Romanticism and children’s literature.