Little Men

Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo's Boys is a children's novel by the American writer Louisa May Alcott, first published in 1871 by Roberts Brothers.

The book reprises characters from Alcott's two-volume novel Little Women and acts as a sequel in the unofficial trilogy that ends with Jo's Boys, and How They Turned Out in 1886. It describes the life of Jo Bhaer and her husband as they run a school and educate the various children at Plumfield, where book education is combined with learning about morals and nature and the pupils are taught through experience. The teaching methods used at the school reflect the transcendentalist ideals of Alcott's father, Bronson Alcott, and the paradoxes in the story are there to emphasise her own views on social norms. Plumfield houses Jo and the Professor's two sons and twelve rescued orphan boys, and the novel follows the ordinary running of the place and the characters of the children it takes in. Alcott wrote it after the death of her brother-in-law, John Bridge Pratt, who had inspired one of the characters in the earlier book.

Alcott wrote for children and drew on her own family's ideas about education, and the Plumfield books are less a plot than an account of a household.