Writer became a champion of the cities she learned to love

An East Coast transplant, Jean Adams Ervin grew to love her new home of Minneapolis — even if she didn't always show it.

The guidebook author, known in her family for her acerbic tongue, didn't hold back when describing shortcomings she saw in the city's urban landmarks. In "The Twin Cities Perceived," her 1976 city guide with illustrations, Ervin skewered Nicollet Mall, which had been completed a decade prior.

Though she appreciated the trees and benches, "some of the granite fountains are ungainly bathtubs, and there is about the total design a fussiness, a too eager attempt to make it a fun place."

She was especially offended by the "anything but stylish" buildings along the Mall. "Dayton's steadfastly retains two mismatched, dirt brown facades …," she wrote. "And most of the existing buildings simply fade from memory through sheer lack of style."

Adams, a writer who chronicled the Twin Cities of the 1970s, died Feb. 20 at 95.

Born in Springfield, Mass., and raised in Northampton, Mass., Ervin made her way to New York City after graduating from Smith College in 1945.

In the 1950s, she met her future husband, John Ervin Jr., and the pair quit their jobs to travel for three months in Europe. John's career brought the couple to Minneapolis in 1957, when he got a job as the director of the University of Minnesota Press. (He served in that role 30 years, and died in 2011.)

But it wasn't long before Ervin immersed herself in the culture, becoming a regular patron of the Guthrie Theater after it opened in 1963. Her social circle grew thanks to her husband's position, which introduced her to writers and artists.

"I remember they used to hold cocktail parties and my brothers and I would be told to stay upstairs," said her son Andrew Ervin. "The house was so alive. It was fascinating to spy on the conversations."

After Ervin got her Ph.D. in English literature at the U, she taught there and at what was then the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul. By the early 1970s, she began to pursue her own writing career and would become her adopted city's champion.

She and her husband self-published "The Twin Cities Explored" in 1972, a guidebook based on the performances they attended and the restaurants where they dined.

Ervin was the sole author of the sequel, "The Twin Cities Perceived," the illustrated guide in which she blasted Nicollet Mall.

Ervin edited "The Minnesota Experience," a compilation of short stories by local writers, including F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was later republished as "North Country Reader" by the Minnesota Historical Society Press. She also edited a literary magazine and published her own essays, which she imbued with her signature wit. One of her writings landed in "Best American Essays" of 1993.

"In her final years, she increasingly was interested in writing a lot of memoirs, using her past as a sort of touchstone," said Keith Ervin, her oldest son. She also dipped into fiction. He described one of her "Kafkaesque" stories about a person losing their mind while trapped in a room similar to Ervin's study.

"It was sort of disturbing," Keith Ervin said. "I asked her if she was feeling all right."

Ervin shot back with a characteristically biting retort.

"She said, 'It's a piece of fiction, Keith.' "