Alice Adams

Alice Boyd Adams (b. 1926–d. 1999) published five collections of short stories, eleven novels, a travel memoir, and many uncollected stories, essays, and reviews during a four-decade career that began slowly when she was in her thirties. The O. Henry Memorial Award series gave her a Special Award for Continuing Achievement as a short-story writer in 1982, citing “her clear, sometimes poignant, sometimes ironic, but always deeply sympathetic view of the complexities of contemporary life.” She is one of only four writers (the others: Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, and Alice Munro) to have been so honored. As a White child growing up in segregated Chapel Hill, Adams resisted the racist values of the South. After spending her summers in Maine and a school year in Wisconsin, she idealized the North, a view that hardened while she finished high school in Richmond, Virginia. She attended Radcliffe College during World War II, graduating at age nineteen, and worked briefly in publishing before marrying Boston-native Mark Linenthal Jr. The couple lived in Europe, where he taught at the Salzburg Seminars and studied at the Sorbonne. In 1948, she followed Linenthal to California and worked as an office clerk while he attended Stanford. Their only child, Peter Adams Linenthal, arrived in 1951. The family settled in San Francisco, where Adams continued to live after she divorced Linenthal in 1958 and began to publish short stories. Her first novel, Careless Love (1966), led to more story sales, including her first New Yorker acceptance in 1969. Eventually, Adams would publish twenty-two stories in that magazine. Though she was categorized as “a New Yorker writer,” some of her most important work appeared in literary quarterlies. A young editor at Alfred A. Knopf, Victoria Wilson, purchased Families and Survivors, beginning her long relationship with both Wilson and Knopf. While Adams’s short stories are her greatest artistic achievement and deserve serious critical attention, the full span of her fiction offers social commentary on 20th-century American lives, especially regarding the challenges of feminism to romantic ideals and conventional gender roles, women’s friendships, political upheaval that disrupts personal morality and expectations, racial relations in the Jim Crow South and American civil rights era, the impact of geographical and economic displacement on individual lives, and the role of artists in the United States.