Adler was a staff writer-reporter for The New Yorker for over thirty years and the chief film critic for The New York Times from 1968 to 1969.
[7] Adler grew up in Danbury, Connecticut and attended Bryn Mawr College, where she studied philosophy under José Ferrater Mora and German literature.
[8][9] She then pursued her interest in philosophy, linguistics and structuralism at the Sorbonne under the tutelage of Jean Wahl and Claude Lévi-Strauss, graduating in 1961.
[18][19][20] In 1973, John Doar, whom Adler had met while covering the Selma March, approached her with an offer to write speeches for Peter Rodino, the chairman of the Nixon impeachment inquiry of the House Judiciary Committee.
[21][11] Adler accepted, and would later publish Pitch Dark (1983), which fictionalized an affair she had with Burke Marshall, a fellow committee member.
Adler's motivations were considered to be either wanting to "uphold The New Yorker's usually high standards" or stemming from "personal differences with Kael".
[25] She called the Starr Report "an utterly preposterous document: inaccurate, mindless, biased, disorganized, unprofessional, and corrupt.
What it is textually is a voluminous work of demented pornography, with many fascinating characters and several largely hidden story lines.
What it is politically is an attempt, through its own limitless preoccupation with sexual material, to set aside, even obliterate, the relatively dull requirements of real evidence and constitutional procedure.
[27] In 1987, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 1989 she received an honorary doctorate from the Georgetown University School of Law.
[30] Her "Letter from Selma", originally published in the New Yorker in 1965,[31] was included in the Library of America compendium Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1963–1973 (2003),[32] and an essay from her tenure as film critic of The New York Times, on In Cold Blood, is included in the Library of America compendium American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now.
[35] In her memoir Then Again, Diane Keaton said that her character Renata in the 1978 Woody Allen movie Interiors was inspired by Adler.