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Alice Adams : portrait of a writer / Carol Sklenicka.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York : Scribner, [2019]Description: x, 580 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9781451621310
  • 1451621310
Subject(s): Genre/Form:
Contents:
Saved by her dolls (1926, and maternal history) -- Agatha and Nic (paternal history) -- The family romance (1926-1931) -- Depressions (1931-1937) -- Girls (1937-1940) -- North and south (1940-1943) -- Rumors of war at Radcliffe (1943-1945) -- Cocktail of dreams (1946-1947) -- Impersonators (1947-1948) -- Frustrated ambitions (1948-1950) -- Family of three (1950-1957) -- Max Steele (1958) -- Freedom (1958-1961) -- Alone (1961-1963) -- Careless love (1963-1966) -- Robert Kendall McNie (1964-1969) -- Disinherited (1969-1973) -- Editors and friends (1973-1976) -- "Very Colette" (1976-1979) -- Continuing achievement (1980-1981) -- A fateful age (1981-1983) -- Superior women (1984-1985) -- Fame and fortune (1986-1987) -- Things fall apart (1987-1989) -- "The book of Bob" (1990-1992) -- Sick (1992-1995) -- the age card (1995-1999) -- Afterlife.
Summary: "Alice Adams: Portrait of a Writer has the heartbeat of one American woman's life in the twentieth century. It tells an intimate story of how Alice Adams-white, privileged, talented-endured a lonely childhood as a child in the racially distressed South and came of age during the Great Depression and World War II. 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 the Fifties. Divorced with a child to raise, she worked at secretarial jobs for two decades before she could earn a living as a writer. Once celebrated as "America's Colette," Adams is now almost forgotten. With the same meticulous research and vivid storytelling she brought to Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life, Sklenicka's biography of Alice Adams connects the events of Adams's life to the events depicted in her stories. Sklenicka interviewed scores of Adams's friends and acquaintances and spent months, no years, with her letters and manuscripts. By delving into Adams's personal life, she shows how writing saved Adams from sorrows and how life served her writing. In Ploughshares, Jason Appel praised Sklenicka "one of the most astute literary critics of our time" for her weaving of "perceptive analysis of Carver's stories into her narrative of his life" and for her "even-handed presentation of the leading controversies in Carver scholarship." Though this biography never confuses fact and fiction, it allows them brighten and clarify one another"-- Provided by publisher.
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library Biography Adams, A. S628 Available 33111009571718
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"Nobody writes better about falling in love than Alice Adams," a New York Times critic said of the prolific short-story writer and bestselling novelist whose dozens of published stories and eleven novels illuminate the American Century.

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. Divorced with a child to raise, she worked at secretarial jobs for two decades before she could earn a living as a writer. One of only four winners of the O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achieve­ment, Adams wove her life into her fiction and used her writing to understand the changing tides of the twentieth century. 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.

With the same meticulous research and vivid storytelling she brought to Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life , Carol Sklenicka integrates the drama of Adams's deeply felt, elegantly fierce life with a cascade of events--the civil rights and women's movements, the sixties counterculture, and sexual freedom. This biography's revealing analyses of Adams's stories and novels from Careless Love to Superior Women to The Last Lovely City , and her extensive interviews with Adams's family and friends, among them Mary Gaitskill, Diane Johnson, Anne Lamott, and Alison Lurie, 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.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Saved by her dolls (1926, and maternal history) -- Agatha and Nic (paternal history) -- The family romance (1926-1931) -- Depressions (1931-1937) -- Girls (1937-1940) -- North and south (1940-1943) -- Rumors of war at Radcliffe (1943-1945) -- Cocktail of dreams (1946-1947) -- Impersonators (1947-1948) -- Frustrated ambitions (1948-1950) -- Family of three (1950-1957) -- Max Steele (1958) -- Freedom (1958-1961) -- Alone (1961-1963) -- Careless love (1963-1966) -- Robert Kendall McNie (1964-1969) -- Disinherited (1969-1973) -- Editors and friends (1973-1976) -- "Very Colette" (1976-1979) -- Continuing achievement (1980-1981) -- A fateful age (1981-1983) -- Superior women (1984-1985) -- Fame and fortune (1986-1987) -- Things fall apart (1987-1989) -- "The book of Bob" (1990-1992) -- Sick (1992-1995) -- the age card (1995-1999) -- Afterlife.

"Alice Adams: Portrait of a Writer has the heartbeat of one American woman's life in the twentieth century. It tells an intimate story of how Alice Adams-white, privileged, talented-endured a lonely childhood as a child in the racially distressed South and came of age during the Great Depression and World War II. 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 the Fifties. Divorced with a child to raise, she worked at secretarial jobs for two decades before she could earn a living as a writer. Once celebrated as "America's Colette," Adams is now almost forgotten. With the same meticulous research and vivid storytelling she brought to Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life, Sklenicka's biography of Alice Adams connects the events of Adams's life to the events depicted in her stories. Sklenicka interviewed scores of Adams's friends and acquaintances and spent months, no years, with her letters and manuscripts. By delving into Adams's personal life, she shows how writing saved Adams from sorrows and how life served her writing. In Ploughshares, Jason Appel praised Sklenicka "one of the most astute literary critics of our time" for her weaving of "perceptive analysis of Carver's stories into her narrative of his life" and for her "even-handed presentation of the leading controversies in Carver scholarship." Though this biography never confuses fact and fiction, it allows them brighten and clarify one another"-- Provided by publisher.

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