Alice Adams (writer)

Alice Adams
Alice Adams in 1997
Born	1926 Fredericksburg, Virginia
Died	1999 San Francisco, California
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Radcliffe College
Known for	Writer, Novelist, Professor
Notable work	Beautiful Girl (1979) To See You Again (1982) Return Trips (1985) After You've Gone (1989) The Last Lovely City (1999)
Spouse(s)	Mark Linenthal

Beautiful Girl (1979) To See You Again (1982) Return Trips (1985) After You've Gone (1989)

Alice Adams (August 14, 1926 – May 27, 1999) was an American novelist, short story writer, and university professor.

Alice Adams was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, the only child of Agatha Erskine (Boyd) Adams and Nicholson Barney Adams. Her father was a Spanish professor and her mother an aspiring, but unfulfilled writer. Adams described her family as "three difficult, isolated people." She grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She graduated from high school at age 15 and then attended Radcliffe College, from which she graduated in 1946 at the age of 19. She married Mark Linenthal, a Harvard student, soon after graduation. They lived in Paris for a year, of which she said "I loved Paris, except I disliked [Mark Linenthal] so much." They then moved to Palo Alto where he attended Stanford University. They moved to San Francisco in 1948, where she found little time to pursue her writing. Their only child, artist Peter Linenthal, was born in 1951.

She sold her short story, Winter Rain, to Charm magazine. Her first novel was Careless Love (1966); in 1969 she began publishing stories in The New Yorker and received growing recognition. Eventually, she published more than 25 stories there. She wrote eleven novels, including the bestseller Superior Women, but is best known and most admired for her short stories, collected in Beautiful Girl (1979), To See You Again (1982), Return Trips (1985), After You've Gone (1989), and The Last Lovely City (1999), as well a in the posthumous selection called The Stories of Alice Adams (2002). She published all short story collections and all but one novel at Knopf Publishing Group. After the War, published posthumously, was published at G. K. Hall & Co..

Adams's place in late-twentieth-century American literature has been earned, writes Christine C. Ferguson, "not only by the skill and deftness of her prose, but also by her challenge to hackneyed dismissal of love's redemptive possibilities. She presents a world where the potential for smart and independent women to have their cake and eat it, too, to enjoy professional and romantic success, stubbornly persists even if not often realized. No romanticist, Adams never flinches from describing all the vagaries and disappointments that afflict sexual and platonic relationships, but neither does she ever permit these descriptions to produce a sense of crushing pessimism." Reviewers described her work as "fusing the sensibilities of Jane Austen and Mary McCarthy." She received numerous awards, including the O. Henry Lifetime Achievement Award and Best American Short Stories Award. Her stories have frequently been anthologized, including in 22 O. Henry Awards collections.