A 'Very Romantic' Native of Chapel Hill Pursues the Literary Life

Author of 15 books over the course of four decades, including collections of short stories and one travel book, Alice Adams '47 says she "always wanted to be a writer."

"She writes because she has to," says Adams' son, Peter A. Linenthal.

A painter and illustrator residing in San Francisco, Linenthal says a visit to his mother's hometown of Chapel Hill, N.c., helped explain her passion.

"Writing and story-telling were a big part of what people talked about there," he says.

It seemed like: How could you not write coming from there?" he adds.

Born in 1926, Adams was an only child. Her father was a Spanish professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the family was very involved in the academic community.

Adams, who now resides in San Francisco, acknowledges the influence that living in the shadow of the university had on her career choice.

"Chapel Hill is such a literary, bookish town," she says, nothing that she wanted to write as long as she can remember.

However, Adams says that her father's profession cannot entirely account for her attraction to writing. Still, "it could account for my inability to learn Spanish," she quips.

Adams attended secondary school at St. Catherine's, an Episcopal "girls' boarding school in Virginia which I truly hated."

Radcliffe, she says was a welcome relief.

"The women at Radcliffe were so unlike those at St. Catherine's. It was extraordinary," she says. "They were leftist."

"There wasn't all that emphasis on money and family and all that nonsense," she explains.

Though Adams said she was more comfortable with the values she fund at the College, the persistence of anti-Semitism troubled her.

"I'll never forget a girl who told me I shouldn't go out with Jewish boys because then all their friends would ask me out," she says. "Well, I thought that sounded terrific."

Drawn to the University because she had heard that Harvard had the best English department in the country and because she was "anxious to get as far away form St. Catherine's as possible and to where the boys were," Adams describes entering Radcliffe in the summer of 1943 as "wonderful."

"I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. It was marvelous," she says.

Although she found Radcliffe very different form St. Catherine's, Adams says the cultural adjustment was minimal.

"I thought this was where I was supposed to be," she says. "I found shared values with friends. Also, it seemed O.K. to be bright. In the South, girls aren't supposed to be."

Compared to her classmates, however, Adams says she was "very unsophisticated, very romantic."

When she met classmate Alison Lurie '47, who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1985, Adams says Lurie seemed "like a sophisticated New York woman. I was very frightened of her."

"We were in a class together and we were reading [F.] Scott Fitzgerald. I thought he was wonderful and said so and she said she thought he 'sounds terribly Saturday Evening Post," Adams says.

Adams and Lurie enrolled together in the first writing seminar ever offered at Harvard, Adams says. They were the only two women in the class.

According to Lurie, it took some time for the other students to get used to their presence.

"You have to understand that [Adams] was one of the most beautiful young women in her class at Redcliffe," Lurie says in an interview from London.

"She was like a big, pink Southern rose," Lurie says. "Just her appearance was quite disruptive at first."

However, once the transition was made, Lurie says, Adams' contribution was clear.

"She was, perhaps, the only Southerner in our class. She brought to writing and to this New England background a feeling of soft Southern nights and lush foliage and intense romantic passions," Lurie said.

But Adams says she was not always so well-received.

"I took writing from a man--who shall remain nameless--who told me that I was a very nice girl and should get married and forget about writing," she says.

Generally, however, Adams says her experiences with professors were positive, identifying Douglas Bush and Efo Matheson as particularly influential.

Graduating early through an accelerated program, Adams married Mark Linenthal Jr. '43, then a graduate student in English, in the fall of 1946.

The couple initially lived in Cambridge, while Linenthal studied at Harvard. After a year in Paris, they was studying at Stanford for his doctorate. In 1951, Peter was born. Adams divorced Linenthal in 1960.

Apart form a job in advertising which Adams describes as "a mistake all around," she devoted her time to writing and teaching. She has taught as a visiting professor at Stanford and at the University of California, at the Berkeley and Davis campuses.

Her first publication was a story called "Winter Rain" in a now-defunct magazine, Charm.

Peter Linenthal says that although he was very young at the time, he remembers when his mother sold her first story.

"I think we were on vacation in her parents' cabin in Maine when she found out. It was very exciting," he says.

In 1966, Adams published her first novel, titled Careless Love, she says, "much against my will."

"I wanted to call it the The Fall of Daisy Duke," she says. "It's the story of a disastrous love affair about which I was trying to be funny and I thought that title would convey that."

"Careless Love was simply embarrassing," she adds.

For her second novel, Families and Survivors, Adams changed publishers. She continues to work with Alfred A. Knopf.

Departing from her fiction work, Adams published Mexico: Some Travels and Some Travelers There in 1990.

"I had been traveling there [in Mexico] for some years," she says. "I find the people enormously sympathetic."

Adams recently completed a tour for her latest book, Medicine Men, and is halfway through a new novel.

Writing is "one way to get through having a book come out," she says. "Having a book come out fairly horrible."

Adams says her work in progress is "sort of a sequel" to Southern Exposure, published in 1995.

"I consider stopping writing all the time but I never do," she says.

"I think [writing] has become increasingly important as she's had more success with it," Peter Linenthal says. "But I know it's something she's always done even before she was successful."

"She always has something that she's working on," he adds. "She really keeps at it."