In 1982 she became the third author of only four to receive the O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement for her short stories (others having gone to John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, and Alice Munro).

After working in publishing in New York, she married Mark Linenthal Junior, a Harvard student who had been a prisoner-of-war in Germany.

Her first novel was Careless Love (1966); in 1969 she began publishing stories in The New Yorker and received growing recognition.

She wrote eleven novels, including the bestseller Superior Women, but is best known and most admired for her short stories, collected in Beautiful Girl (1979), To See You Again (1982), Return Trips (1985), After You've Gone (1989), and The Last Lovely City (1999), as well as in the posthumous selection called The Stories of Alice Adams (2002).

[3] Adams's place in late-twentieth-century American literature has been earned, writes Christine C. Ferguson, "not only by the skill and deftness of her prose, but also by her challenge to hackneyed dismissal of love's redemptive possibilities.

She presents a world where the potential for smart and independent women to have their cake and eat it, too, to enjoy professional and romantic success, stubbornly persists even if not often realized.

No romanticist, Adams never flinches from describing all the vagaries and disappointments that afflict sexual and platonic relationships, but neither does she ever permit these descriptions to produce a sense of crushing pessimism.

[5] Adams sometimes followed a pattern she called ABDCE in outlining a short story, which she described to her friend Anne Lamott.

She enjoyed close friendships with authors Mary Gaitskill, Anne Lamott, Max Steele, Ella Leffland, Diane Johnson, Alison Lurie, and Carolyn See, and editors Frances Kiernan, William Abrahams, and Victoria Wilson.