A journalist and general editor at Newsweek, Strouse has written a biography of Alice James, the sister of Henry and William James, that one critic observed to be "more than a biography, a complicated work of social history." In Alice James: A Biography (1980), Strouse presents James as a potentially brilliant woman who was emotionally crippled by the conventions of nineteenth-century society. Denied the opportunities available to her brothers, Alice "made a career of emotional collapse." The biography won the Bancroft Prize in American history and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award.