Drawn to the University because she had heard that Harvard had the best English department in the country and because she was "anxious to get as far away form St. Catherine's as possible and to where the boys were," Adams describes entering Radcliffe in the summer of 1943 as "wonderful."

"I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. It was marvelous," she says.

Although she found Radcliffe very different form St. Catherine's, Adams says the cultural adjustment was minimal.

"I thought this was where I was supposed to be," she says. "I found shared values with friends. Also, it seemed O.K. to be bright. In the South, girls aren't supposed to be."

Compared to her classmates, however, Adams says she was "very unsophisticated, very romantic."

When she met classmate Alison Lurie '47, who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1985, Adams says Lurie seemed "like a sophisticated New York woman. I was very frightened of her."

"We were in a class together and we were reading [F.] Scott Fitzgerald. I thought he was wonderful and said so and she said she thought he 'sounds terribly Saturday Evening Post," Adams says.

Adams and Lurie enrolled together in the first writing seminar ever offered at Harvard, Adams says. They were the only two women in the class.

According to Lurie, it took some time for the other students to get used to their presence.

"You have to understand that [Adams] was one of the most beautiful young women in her class at Redcliffe," Lurie says in an interview from London.

"She was like a big, pink Southern rose," Lurie says. "Just her appearance was quite disruptive at first."

However, once the transition was made, Lurie says, Adams' contribution was clear.

"She was, perhaps, the only Southerner in our class. She brought to writing and to this New England background a feeling of soft Southern nights and lush foliage and intense romantic passions," Lurie said.

But Adams says she was not always so well-received.

"I took writing from a man--who shall remain nameless--who told me that I was a very nice girl and should get married and forget about writing," she says.