Eve LaPlante is an American writer of historical non-fiction.
LaPlante has published non-fiction books and many articles and essays, primarily about New England historical subjects, including some of her early American ancestors such as Anne Hutchinson in American Jezebel. Her nonfiction book Salem Witch Judge, won the 2008 Massachusetts Book Award for Nonfiction.
LaPlante's ancestor biographies have been “praised as reminiscent of a more celebratory Nathaniel Hawthorne", according to the Boston Book Festival. In the anthology Boston, which includes the preface to American Jezebel, Shaun O'Connell wrote: "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 is a first cousin, four generations removed, of Louisa May Alcott through the only daughter (Charlotte May Wilkinson) of Louisa's uncle, the abolitionist and reformer, Samuel Joseph May and his wife Lucretia Flagge Coffin May.
She also collected and edited the private papers of her great great great great-aunt Abby May Alcott, the abolitionist and suffragist who was Louisa's mother and mentor. These writings were collected and published in 2012, under the title My Heart Is Boundless: Writings of Abigail May Alcott, Louisa's Mother (Free Press). LaPlante also authored a dual biography of Abba May Alcott and Louisa May Alcott entitled: Marmee & Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother (Free Press, 2012).[1]
LaPlante graduated from Princeton University and received a Master's degree in education from Harvard University.[2]
Eve LaPlante's books have received many awards () and widely praised. Her reviews include:
Marmee and Lousia
"Abigail May Alcott is at the center of Marmee & Louisa ... 'Marmee,' as her daughters called her, was a fine writer, an indefatigable reformer, a devoted teacher — and, above all, Louisa's literary lodestar ... [After] the wildly popular Little Women...Bronson was in clover. He was, he crowed, 'the Father of Miss Alcott.' At last, people came to hear him lecture. To his credit, though, and after his fashion, he mentioned in passing that Louisa's mother hadn't yet received 'her full share.' To her credit, LaPlante evens the score." - New York Times[3]
My Heart is Boundless: Writings of Abigail May Alcott, Louisa's Mother
LaPlante certainly is justified in crowing about "My Heart Is Boundless," the vibrant companion volume that has been released synchronously with "Marmee & Louisa." For the first time, Abigail May Alcott's own writings — once thought to have been destroyed — have been compiled and published. LaPlante has edited and lightly annotated a rich selection of letters, journal entries, and sketches that demonstrate, in Abigail's own words, the spirited, complicated, visionary woman she was. - Seattle Times[4]
Salem Witch Judge: The Life and Repentance of Samuel Sewall