About Eve LaPlante
A New Englander with degrees from Princeton and Harvard, LaPlante has published articles, essays, and five nonfiction books. Seized is a narrative portrait of a common brain disorder that can alter personality, illuminating the mind-body problem and the limits of free will. American Jezebel tells the true story of LaPlante’s ancestor the colonial heretic and founding mother Anne Hutchinson. LaPlante’s second ancestor biography, Salem Witch Judge, about the 1692 judge who became an abolitionist and feminist, won the 2008 Massachusetts Book Award for Nonfiction. Her latest biography, Marmee & Louisa, a narrative portrait of Louisa May Alcott's relationship with her mother, Abigail, was named a top ten book of the year by NPR. LaPlante collected and edited My Heart Is Boundless, the first compilation of the writings of Abigail May Alcott and a companion volume to Marmee & Louisa.
LaPlante’s biographies “have been praised,” according to the Boston Book Festival, “as reminiscent of a more celebratory Nathaniel Hawthorne.” In the anthology Boston, which includes the preface to LaPlante’s American Jezebel, Shaun O’Connell observed, “Just as Nathaniel Hawthorne dug into the dark history of his ancestry, which reached back both to the original Boston settlement of the 1630s and the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s, so too did LaPlante trace family members who were rooted in the same eras ... Hawthorne took shame upon himself for the misdeeds of his Puritan ancestors, and LaPlante offers praise for her forebears who testified against Puritan repression. As her prefaces to these biographies, a kind of spiritual autobiography, show, Anne Hutchinson and Samuel Sewall were not the dark Puritans many imagined them to be. They remain living presences, even models of rectitude, into the twenty-first century.”
LaPlante, a cousin of Louisa May Alcott and a great-niece of Abigail May Alcott, lives in Massachusetts with her husband and has four adult children.
LaPlante’s biographies “have been praised,” according to the Boston Book Festival, “as reminiscent of a more celebratory Nathaniel Hawthorne.” In the anthology Boston, which includes the preface to LaPlante’s American Jezebel, Shaun O’Connell observed, “Just as Nathaniel Hawthorne dug into the dark history of his ancestry, which reached back both to the original Boston settlement of the 1630s and the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s, so too did LaPlante trace family members who were rooted in the same eras ... Hawthorne took shame upon himself for the misdeeds of his Puritan ancestors, and LaPlante offers praise for her forebears who testified against Puritan repression. As her prefaces to these biographies, a kind of spiritual autobiography, show, Anne Hutchinson and Samuel Sewall were not the dark Puritans many imagined them to be. They remain living presences, even models of rectitude, into the twenty-first century.”
LaPlante, a cousin of Louisa May Alcott and a great-niece of Abigail May Alcott, lives in Massachusetts with her husband and has four adult children.
Feel free to contact the author at eve@evelaplante.com.
For a review copy of Marmee & Louisa or My Heart Is Boundless, please contact publicist Erin Reback at (212) 698-7426 or erin.reback@simonandschuster.com.
For a review copy of Salem Witch Judge or American Jezebel, please contact publicist Julie Burton at (415) 477-4407 or julie.burton@harpercollins.com.
To schedule an interview or event, please email eve@evelaplante.com or erin.reback@simonandschuster.com.
For a review copy of Marmee & Louisa or My Heart Is Boundless, please contact publicist Erin Reback at (212) 698-7426 or erin.reback@simonandschuster.com.
For a review copy of Salem Witch Judge or American Jezebel, please contact publicist Julie Burton at (415) 477-4407 or julie.burton@harpercollins.com.
To schedule an interview or event, please email eve@evelaplante.com or erin.reback@simonandschuster.com.