Alice Adams: Overlooked or over-praised?

Little read today, Alice Adams was one of the premiere story writers of her time; she died in 1999 in her 70s and published over her career +25 stories in the New Yorker and won numerous O.Henry awards and others. But she's seldom if ever mentioned among the great American writers of the 20th century. Has she been overlooked, or was she over-praised in her day? I recently came across an article or review that mentioned her work and thought I'd follow the lead: My library had on shelf at least a dozen of her works, testimony to her popularity at one time and her obscurity today. Recognizing that her stories are considered her best work, I icked up The Stories of Alice Adams, a 2002 posthumous publication from Knopf, then and now a top-drawer literary publisher. A few observations, then, based on the first six stories (of the 53 in this book): First off, what a crappy publishing job by Knopf! There's no sense of her total output of stories, no indication of original publication of any of the stories, no intro or afterward, and, worst of all, no information on date of publication or composition. Are the stories arranged chronologically? Or by some other method? Who knows? But it makes if impossible to read through these stories and get any sense of AA's development as a writer. The first story is set on a wealthy Southern manor house, seeming to be in about the 1940s, and it's a really good piece (Verlie I Say Unto You) that gives a sense of a white family willfully oblivious to the lives and struggles of their "servants." It's also completely different from the next 5 stories, so I don't know what to make of it: One of her earliest stories? A style and setting she later abandoned? Or a one-off that the editor put first because of its emotional and sociological power? In any event, the next 5 stories are, I think, much more typical of AA's writing: Set in San Francisco for the most part (that was her home town), generally among the wealthy professional classes, each one involving doomed doomed or failed relationships: a squabbling couple on a getaway, a woman with a serious alcohol problem who has a meet-up with a college boyfriend from her youth, two brothers whose differing life courses - one is a successful lawyer and the other a literary dilettante, living off family fortune - are perhaps not so far apart as they seem. In many way, her characters are much like the readers in her day most likely to come across these stories in the New Yorker. There is nothing in the least formally inventive in these pieces - she's completely removed from the postmodern movement and even of the "modern" short stories of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Woolf, et al. Yet for all that, they're entirely readable and perfectly accomplish their goals, with minimal fuss and confusion. She's no Alice Munro - who in many ways was the next-generation version of AA - but worth a deeper and longer look at her work.