Carol Sklenicka
Both Carver and Adams were known for intimate, strikingly lean narrative styles based closely on life experiences,[1] and both are credited with modeling a new commitment to realism in American fiction.
Studying with critic and translator Naomi Lebowitz, novelist Stanley Elkin, and poet Howard Nemerov, she received a Ph.D. in English and American literature there in 1986.
The Lawrence book included a substantial amount of biographical material[9] and beginning in 1994 Sklenicka began focusing her time on researching and writing the first of two successive full-length literary biographies.
He is credited with helping revitalize the genre of the English-language short story in the late 20th century.”[15] Sklenicka's biography of Raymond Carver has been highly praised.
[23] Alice Adams, according to Professor Bryant Mangum in a 2019 book-length study, created powerful short fiction narratives that place her “in the company of such great American writers as Joyce Carol Oates, Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.”[24] More than 25 of her stories appeared in the New Yorker between 1969 and 1995.
)[29] Also widely reviewed and praised,[30] Sklenicka's biography of Alice Adams develops an intimate and detailed portrait of a well-educated (Radcliffe), well-married, and well-traveled young southern woman who is transplanted to San Francisco.
Over the next few years she extricates herself from an unhappy marriage and becomes known for her compelling fictional narratives of women with independent spirits in an era when it was not easy for a single woman to earn a living regardless of her education and privilege.
Adams's life and work, said Barbara Lane in the San Francisco Chronicle, “encompass many of the major forces that shaped the last half of the 20th century.
[33] “This is feminism in literary action, the contemplative end of a continuum,” John Updike wrote in his introduction to The Best American Short Stories of the Century.
The pictures of family, friends, former lovers, and a beautiful and independent woman at different stages of her life demonstrate that her fiction does indeed “contain Adams the person” as Alam said in The New Republic.
[44] In a final homage, the book-design team framed the Adams cover portrait in a style inspired by the book jacket of her most successful novel, Superior Women.
[46] Later, looking back on the decade for Prize Stories of the Seventies from the O. Henry Awards, Abrahams described “the emotional and psychological climate of the 1970s” within which writers working “at the level of art” managed to thrive.
[52] Given the marked differences in their writing styles, it is notable how often Adams and Carver shared space in the same short story anthologies and how often they were implicitly or explicitly compared.
