{"product_id":"alice-adams-portrait-of-a-writer-9781451621334","title":"Alice Adams: Portrait of a Writer","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe first full-scale biography of prolific writer Alice Adams, whose celebrated stories and bestselling novels traced women's lives and illuminated \"an era characterized both by drastic cultural changes and by the persistence of old expectations, conventions, and biases\" (\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e). \u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\"Nobody writes better about falling in love than Alice Adams,\" a \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003ecritic 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. 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 20th 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eCarol 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 from \u003ci\u003eCareless Love \u003c\/i\u003eto \u003ci\u003eSuperior Women\u003c\/i\u003e to \u003ci\u003eThe Last Lovely City\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.\" \u003ci\u003eAlice Adams: Portrait of a Writer\u003c\/i\u003e captures not just a beloved woman's life in full, but a crucial span of American history.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eBinding Type:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Scribner Book Company\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 12\/08\/2020\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN:\u003c\/b\u003e 9781451621334\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 592\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 1.05lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 8.00h x 5.60w x 1.50d","brand":"Carol Sklenicka","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":38018498592949,"sku":"9781451621334","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0473\/0804\/6492\/products\/img_c4cbfcb3-c9be-4b5d-8b11-1f2d3dd3c66c.jpg?v=1609169606","url":"https:\/\/pastforward.org\/products\/alice-adams-portrait-of-a-writer-9781451621334","provider":"Past Forward","version":"1.0","type":"link"}