Alice Adams

Alice Adams 1926-99, American novelist, b. Fredericksburg, Va. Her deftly wry and witty fiction concerns 20th-century domestic and professional life, and usually concentrates on the lives of women in various stages of transition. Adams wrote a total of 11 novels, including Careless Love (1966), Superior Women (1984), Caroline's Daughters (1991), Almost Perfect (1993) and A Southern Exposure (1995) and its sequel, the posthumously published After the War (2000). Adams is also noted for her short stories, collected in such volumes as To See You Again (1982), The Last Lovely City (1999), and the posthumous anthology The Stories of Alice Adams (2002).

Alice Adams, novel by Booth Tarkington, published in 1921 and awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

Alice, a pretty girl, anxious to escape her Midwestern lower‐middle‐class life, dreams of the stage or a rich marriage. Her father, Virgil Adams, nagged by his wife, leaves his lifelong job at Lamb's drug company, to open a glue factory with the formula he invented for Mr. Lamb. Alice, forsaken by local beaux because of her family's pushing ways, falls in love with a wealthy newcomer, Arthur Russell. To snare him she fabricates a web of small lies about herself and her family, which turns him against her when he sees the truth at a pathetic family dinner party. As their affair ends, her brother Walter absconds with the drug firm's money, and Virgil's new business is ruined by competition from Mr. Lamb, who nevertheless aids Virgil when he has a paralytic stroke. He recovers, his wife opens a boardinghouse to support him, and Alice, sadly wiser, becomes a typist.

Adams, Alice (1926–1999), Virginia‐born author, educated at Radcliffe, long resident in San Francisco, whose novels include Careless Love (1966), Families and Survivors (1974), Listening to Billie (1978), Rich Rewards (1980), and Superior Women (1984), sensitive studies of women—young to middle‐aged—and their relations to family, friends, husbands, and lovers, Second Chances (1988), a novel about a group of longtime friends having important relationships in older age. Later novels include A Southern Exposure (1995) and its sequel, After the War (2000, published posthumously). Adams is also known for stories, collected in Beautiful Girl (1979), You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (1981), To See You Again (1982), Return Trips (1986), After You've Gone (1989), and The Last Lovely City (1999). An anthology, The Stories of Alice Adams, appeared in 2002.