Alice AdamsStudy Guide

Virgil Adams lies sick in April night air he is sure will kill him. Miss Perry keeps the windows open anyway. At dawn the city starts: milk wagons, factory whistles, a robin in the small yard. Then his wife comes in with cheer that is not cheer. She tells him he is nearly well, and that once he is on his feet he must not go back to that hole at Lamb and Company. He calls it his business. She calls it a hole. She leaves in tears. He whispers a bitter line about daily bread, because this performance is not new.

Alice Adams is the daughter who has to make the house look like more than it is. She borrows, dyes, and invents. She walks downtown with a stick she hopes will read as fashion, and she treats every nod as a grade. Mrs. Adams pushes the family toward a life the salary cannot cover, and she has a plan for it: a glue process Virgil worked out on Lamb's payroll twenty-five years ago. Walter works at Lamb's, runs with a rougher crowd, and later needs three hundred and fifty dollars he will not explain. Mildred Palmer calls Alice a friend and never mentions the cousin everyone expects her to marry. Arthur Russell, that cousin, dances with Alice out of kindness and then keeps walking her home. J. A. Lamb, the old employer, will close the book with a price, not a sermon.

At the Palmer dance Alice's tin-foil violets fail next to Mildred's florist bouquet, and the rented Ford has to be left at the kerb so the porte-cochere will not tell on them. She saves a chair, taps her foot, and plays the girl whose partner has only stepped away. Walter is found shooting dice in the cloak-room. A week later Russell walks her home, and she invents cigars for her sick father and turns the dice into research. Then Virgil gives in. He mortgages the house, resigns from Lamb's by letter, and opens a glue works whose smell fills the street. At lunch with the Palmers, Russell hears the club version: old Lamb trusted a clerk, and the clerk walked off with the secret. Mrs. Palmer calls Alice a pushing sort of girl, and he says nothing. Then Mrs. Adams stages a dinner they cannot afford: hired help, roses, caviar, Brussels sprouts, and a heat wave that wilts the room before the food is served. Russell will not meet Alice's eyes. She tells him he is never coming back and hands him the hat he forgot. That night an old friend brings word that Walter is short in his accounts at Lamb's.

Tarkington published Alice Adams in 1921 and won the Pulitzer for it in 1922, his second. He lets the romance carry the reader's hope, then moves the weight somewhere else. Alice is not a villain and not a joke. She has learned that class is a costume, and she wears it until the heat, the hired maid, and the silent guest make it impossible. The money plot belongs to her parents, and so does the debt. Lamb answers the glue works with a sign across the street, then buys the little plant for enough to clear the mortgage and Walter's deficit. The house fills with boarders. Nobody rescues Alice, and nobody punishes her. She still has to choose the stairs rather than another walk downtown in borrowed flowers.

Read the full summary on the book page →