Alice Adams: Portrait of a Writer captures not just a beloved woman’s life in full, but a crucial span of American history.
Blake Bailey said in a review for The New York Times: “The disappointments of romance — ‘the great subject’of Adams’s life and work, as Carol Sklenicka writes in her new biography, Alice Adams: Portrait of a Writer — were all the more muddled with her other great subject, family misery.
“Indeed, Adams’ youth was largely a matter of amassing material for the late-blooming literary career. The end of her dismal marriage to Mark Linenthal coincided with her first published story, Winter Rain, at 32, whereupon she resumed having love affairs for many years.”
Bailey added: “As a writer Adams was often compared to Mary McCarthy, Jane Austen and John Updike, but her own favorite touchstone was F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose work she read again and again. Certainly, Adams’ stories tend to proceed as a series of evocative, loosely ordered set pieces, impressions — or better just call them memories.”
