"The short story," noted Alice Adams in a 1980 interview with Neil Feinneman, is "the form I love best." Spanning thirty years, Adams's career as a short-story writer was one of the most prolific and successful in recent American literature. In addition to nine novels and many uncollected stories, Adams published six short-story collections, the last of which, The Last Lovely City, appeared only shortly before her death on 26 May 1999. Adams's starkly realist yet emotionally intense prose and her thematic interest in the quest for self-knowledge has drawn her comparisons with Colette, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Critics and popular readers have lauded her depictions of the lives and romantic pursuits of independent female protagonists who, even in the face of loss and suffering, refuse the mantle of victimhood and instead become survivors.

Adams's success, marked both by the size of her audience and the number of prestigious...