Set of Five First Editions w/ Dust Jackets, All VG Caroline's Daughters (1991), The Last Lovely City (1991), Medicine Men (1997), After the War, (2000; 3rd.Imp) and The Stories of Alice Adams (2002)

New York: Knopf, 1999 - 2002. First Editions. hardcovers. VG Very Good/VG Very Good. All octavos, Full gilt-embossed quarter-bound cloth w/ mylar-protected dust jackets. Please feel free to inquire as to particulars and/or additional photographs. ... "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. "Reviewers described her work as "fusing the sensibilities of Jane Austen and Mary McCarthy." She taught writing at Stanford University, the University of California, Davis, and Berkeley. ...Adams sometimes followed a pattern she called ABDCE in outlining a short story, which she described to her friend Anne Lamott. "The letters stand for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw [the reader] in, make us want to know more. Background is where you ... see and know who these people are, how they've come to be together, what was going on before the opening of the story. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they care most about. The plot – the drama, the actions, the tension – will grow out of that. You move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different for the main characters, different in some real way. And then there is the ending: what is our sense of who these people are now, what are they left with, what happened, and what did it mean?