Alice Adams
Portrait of a Writer
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The first full-scale biography of prolific writer Alice Adams, whose celebrated stories and bestselling novels traced women’s lives and illuminated “an era characterized both by drastic cultural changes and by the persistence of old expectations, conventions, and biases” (The New Yorker).
“Nobody writes better about falling in love than Alice Adams,” a New York Times critic said of the prolific writer. Born in 1926, Alice Adams grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, during the Great Depression and came of age during World War II. After college at Radcliffe and a year in Paris, she moved to San Francisco. Always a rebel in good-girl’s clothing, Adams used her education, sexual and emotional curiosity, and uncompromising artistic ambition to break the strictures that bound women in midcentury America. Divorced with a child to raise, she worked at secretarial jobs for two decades before she could earn a living as a writer. One of only four winners of the O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement, Adams wove her life into her fiction and used her writing to understand the changing tides of the 20th century. Her work portrays vibrant characters both young and old who live on the edge of their emotions, absorbed by love affairs yet always determined to be independent and to fulfill their personal destinies.
Carol Sklenicka interweaves Adams’s deeply felt, elegantly fierce life with a cascade of events—the civil rights and women’s rights movements, the sixties counterculture, and sexual freedom. Her biography’s revealing analyses of Adams’s stories and novels from Careless Love to Superior Women to The Last Lovely City, and her extensive interviews with Adams’s family and friends, among them Mary Gaitskill, Diane Johnson, Anne Lamott, and Alison Lurie, give us the definitive story of a writer often dubbed “America’s Colette.” Alice Adams: Portrait of a Writer captures not just a beloved woman’s life in full, but a crucial span of American history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Biographer Sklenicka (Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life) succeeds in creating an intriguing portrait of a midcentury fiction writer arguably better known for her acquaintances and times than for her writing. Born into relative privilege in 1926 as the daughter of academics, Adams's parents sent her to boarding school and Radcliffe during the Depression and WWII. Later, the strikingly attractive Adams revolved in Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow's orbit. Yet, while Sklenicka's research indicates that she may have slept with both, hers is not a story of sex to success: those most instrumental in her career were women, such as editor Victoria Wilson, who molded Adams's second novel, 1975's Families and Survivors, into a hit. The times didn't hurt either: after a long apprenticeship, hampered by supporting her husband's own writing career before their 1958 divorce, Adams found an audience in the 1970s that was newly avid for her core concern: female-centric depictions of love and sex. Her career peaked in 1984, when rights to Superior Women sold for $635,000, 15 years before her death from heart problems. A summation of Adams's place in 20th-century literature would have greatly helped, but Sklenicka's well-researched biography nevertheless easily evokes the spirit of Adams's life, times, and works.
