Alice Adams

Alice Adams is twenty-two, pretty, quick, and poor — the daughter of a clerk who has worked thirty years without rising, in a Midwestern city where standing is measured by money and the houses money builds. Alice cannot bear the smallness of her family's position, and she has made an art of seeming to be more than she is: she dresses above her purse, talks brightly past the shabbiness of her home, and gathers roadside violets to carry into a dance because she cannot afford bought flowers.

At a party where she is half-snubbed, Alice meets Arthur Russell, a wealthy and well-connected young man newly come to town, and lets him believe she is something finer than she is. As his calls grow more frequent and her hopes rise, so does her dread of the day he must see her family and her house exactly as they are. Meanwhile her father falls ill, and under pressure from his ambitious wife he is pushed into a risky scheme to start a glue factory of his own — a venture that threatens to expose just how precarious the Adamses' position has always been.

The illness, the debt, and a coarse, calamitous dinner party staged to impress Russell on a sweltering night all converge upon the moment when Alice must finally be seen for what she is. First published in 1921 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Alice Adams is one of the keenest American novels of class aspiration and self-deception — a study, by turns comic and aching, of a young woman's whole performance of gentility cracking under the weight of the facts. Its famous, unsentimental ending, in which Alice climbs the steps of a business college to learn to earn her own living, is among the most honest closing pages in American fiction.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor's foreword on the novel's composition and meaning, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.