One of only four winners of the O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement, Alice 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. Carol Sklenicka integrates the drama of Adams’ deeply felt, elegantly fierce life with a cascade of events --- the civil rights and women’s movements, the ’60s counterculture and sexual freedom. This biography’s revealing analyses of Adams’ stories and novels, and extensive interviews with her family and friends, give us the definitive story of a writer often dubbed “America’s Colette.”