SUMMARY Alice Adams was the author of eleven novels and six collections of short stories, and was the recipient of an O. Henry Award for short fiction twenty-three times. She was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and her life and literary career spanned more than a half century of extraordinary changes for women in American society. In her writing, Adams chronicled those changes in the lives of women following World War II (1939–1945), much as F. Scott Fitzgerald, to whom she has been compared both as a prose stylist and social historian, had chronicled the emergence of the new woman after World War I (1914–1918).