I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one.

On September 6, 1847, Henry David Thoreau left his one-room house at Walden Pond and returned to Concord. Living at Walden for over two years had been a life-changing experience for the thirty-year-old Thoreau. Wanting to be a writer, he went to the pond to write, and while there he did exactly that. He produced two drafts of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. He wrote one lecture about Thomas Carlyle and another about living at the pond called “A History of Myself.” He also penned an essay titled “Ktaadn” about going to Maine in the summer of 1846. And he wrote in his journal almost daily. But what would he do once he was back in Concord?

Your palm is crossed by unique flowing lines that fortune tellers link to your fate. But what if that fate passed through your hand to someone else? In a poem he wrote in childhood, Nathaniel Hawthorne mused, “Oh could I raise the darken’d veil, which hides my future life from me. Could unborn ages slowly sail, before my view—and I could see my every action painted there, to cast one look I would not dare.”

If you dare, read on.

Imagine admiring an author while you are growing up and then ending up in the same stratosphere of success as them. That is what happened to Louisa May Alcott, who was described by contemporaries as an ardent and enthusiastic admirer of Charles Dickens—a writer two decades her senior. Both Dickens and Alcott wrote novels, short stories, and essays; both loved the stage and pursued amateur acting; both integrated social issues into their writings; both went from using pen names to real names; and both became household names. By 1893, only Dickens’ novels were more circulated than Alcott’s in United States public libraries.