Author of 15 books over the course of four decades, including collections of short stories and one travel book, Alice Adams '47 says she "always wanted to be a writer."

"She writes because she has to," says Adams' son, Peter A. Linenthal.

A painter and illustrator residing in San Francisco, Linenthal says a visit to his mother's hometown of Chapel Hill, N.c., helped explain her passion.

"Writing and story-telling were a big part of what people talked about there," he says.

It seemed like: How could you not write coming from there?" he adds.

Born in 1926, Adams was an only child. Her father was a Spanish professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the family was very involved in the academic community.

Adams, who now resides in San Francisco, acknowledges the influence that living in the shadow of the university had on her career choice.

"Chapel Hill is such a literary, bookish town," she says, nothing that she wanted to write as long as she can remember.

However, Adams says that her father's profession cannot entirely account for her attraction to writing. Still, "it could account for my inability to learn Spanish," she quips.

Adams attended secondary school at St. Catherine's, an Episcopal "girls' boarding school in Virginia which I truly hated."

Radcliffe, she says was a welcome relief.

"The women at Radcliffe were so unlike those at St. Catherine's. It was extraordinary," she says. "They were leftist."

"There wasn't all that emphasis on money and family and all that nonsense," she explains.

Though Adams said she was more comfortable with the values she fund at the College, the persistence of anti-Semitism troubled her.

"I'll never forget a girl who told me I shouldn't go out with Jewish boys because then all their friends would ask me out," she says. "Well, I thought that sounded terrific."