Generally, however, Adams says her experiences with professors were positive, identifying Douglas Bush and Efo Matheson as particularly influential.

Graduating early through an accelerated program, Adams married Mark Linenthal Jr. '43, then a graduate student in English, in the fall of 1946.

The couple initially lived in Cambridge, while Linenthal studied at Harvard. After a year in Paris, they was studying at Stanford for his doctorate. In 1951, Peter was born. Adams divorced Linenthal in 1960.

Apart form a job in advertising which Adams describes as "a mistake all around," she devoted her time to writing and teaching. She has taught as a visiting professor at Stanford and at the University of California, at the Berkeley and Davis campuses.

Her first publication was a story called "Winter Rain" in a now-defunct magazine, Charm.

Peter Linenthal says that although he was very young at the time, he remembers when his mother sold her first story.

"I think we were on vacation in her parents' cabin in Maine when she found out. It was very exciting," he says.

In 1966, Adams published her first novel, titled Careless Love, she says, "much against my will."

"I wanted to call it the The Fall of Daisy Duke," she says. "It's the story of a disastrous love affair about which I was trying to be funny and I thought that title would convey that."

"Careless Love was simply embarrassing," she adds.

For her second novel, Families and Survivors, Adams changed publishers. She continues to work with Alfred A. Knopf.

Departing from her fiction work, Adams published Mexico: Some Travels and Some Travelers There in 1990.

"I had been traveling there [in Mexico] for some years," she says. "I find the people enormously sympathetic."

Adams recently completed a tour for her latest book, Medicine Men, and is halfway through a new novel.

Writing is "one way to get through having a book come out," she says. "Having a book come out fairly horrible."

Adams says her work in progress is "sort of a sequel" to Southern Exposure, published in 1995.

"I consider stopping writing all the time but I never do," she says.

"I think [writing] has become increasingly important as she's had more success with it," Peter Linenthal says. "But I know it's something she's always done even before she was successful."

"She always has something that she's working on," he adds. "She really keeps at it."