Alice Adams: Portrait of a Writer

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. Agent: Sandra Dijkstra, Sandra Dijkstra Literary. (Dec.)