Alice Adams: Portrait of a Writer

Name: Alice Adams: Portrait of a Writer
Price: 12.48 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Carol Sklenicka
ISBN: 9781451621334

“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. 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.

In the first full-scale biography of this prolific writer, 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, and her extensive interviews with Adams’s family and friends, 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.