Determined to be a political journalist despite being unable to get a job in Sydney's male-dominated newspapers, in 1964 she won a scholarship to do a master's in journalism at Columbia University in New York and travelled there by freighter on a borrowed one-way fare. She married, had a child, built a career as a writer and teacher, and made New York her home for most of the next 30 years.

That urge to run away, shared by generations of young Australians, has inspired fiction from Christina Stead's For Love Alone (1945) to Michelle de Kretser's Questions of Travel (2012). For the characters in Dancing on Coral it is a fierce, irrational drive as strong as sex. First published in 1987, Adams' novel transforms her experience into a ruthless and hilarious satire of the 1960s that echoes Stead's story of the 1930s. It spoke truthfully to me when I read it soon after moving to New York, in 1988.

Re-reading Dancing on Coral now, I am even more admiring of its intelligence and art. When I pulled my yellowed American edition off the bookshelf I surprised myself by laughing aloud. I am no fan of satire that bangs readers over the head, but here Adams' feminist politics are distilled into exquisite portraits of characters we have all met. (Oh, Donna Bird, floating relentlessly to the centre of every scene in your sun visor and scarves, with your aphorisms, agendas and earnest scribbling in green ink: I hate and adore you.) At 26 years old the novel remains universal, fresh, and ready to connect with new readers.

When the story opens, Lark Watter is a timid university student, living with her parents in a Sydney beachside suburb and saving money to ''wander around the world, until she found some kind of island to settle on, where it would be peaceful''. At home she feels trapped between her moody father, who is constructing a mysterious wooden box in the basement and memorising arcane facts in the hope of winning a ticket to London on a quiz show, and her deeply conventional mother, who wisely insists that Lark finish her education.

A window on to the world opens when Lark meets ''her first American'', Tom Brown, a Harvard and Oxford graduate with charisma, radical opinions and enough scorn for his country to make him attractive to Australians still in the thrall of Britain. She falls for him and becomes as much of a girlfriend as the noncommittal anthropologist will allow. But there is the problem of Donna Bird, daughter of Tom's American mentor, who buzzes around him like a mosquito, and the band of male students who equate drunken vulgarity with cleverness.

Adams cuts down phoney academics and narcissistic poseurs with a glinting blade.

In her quest for adventure and love, Lark cannot see with her creator's clear eyes. She follows Tom to New York, even though this sentences her to weeks on a freighter with the abominable Donna. Where Adams herself had a short, uneventful journey as the sole passenger on her ship, she develops this central section of her novel into a tour de force of tension between the two women. The scene that gives the novel its title is so brilliant that it should not be paraphrased. Adams said she had no idea if a ship could stop in the middle of the ocean and deliver its passengers onto a coral reef, yet she imagines a scenario that is simultaneously surreal and believable, lyrical and suspenseful, like Yann Martel's depiction of a man and a tiger in a lifeboat in Life of Pi but much funnier.

I most recently re-read Adams' novel, by coincidence, while reef snorkelling on an island holiday. I can attest to the dangerous beauty of coral, which tore my flesh as I brushed it, as it shreds Lark's espadrilles. You dance on coral because it is treacherous to stand still and I had to admire plucky Donna, who while stranded with the weeping Lark on a reef in a rising tide declares: ''This is an adventure. You must take whatever chance you can get to do something you would never do under normal circumstances.''

Lark's troubles do not end when she reaches New York. She confronts a self-assured yet neurotic society where political protests, happenings, conspiracies - and Donna Bird - make fun of her plans.

When I arrived in New York, I was fortunate that Glenda Adams was one of the first Australians to welcome me. Pale-skinned, soft-voiced, self-deprecating, she also had the mischievous eye and wry tongue you'd expect of the author of Dancing on Coral. Her survival stories gave me a sense of the insider-outsider life we expats could expect.

After more than 20 years in the city Adams was still dancing on coral and - to complicate the metaphor - straddling the Pacific. Long divorced from her American husband, she was raising their daughter and writing in the study of her Upper West Side apartment, which she had decorated with posters of surrealist art.

In Australia she had already published a collection of short stories (several of which developed into Dancing on Coral) called The Hottest Night of the Century, and the dystopian novel Games of the Strong; in the US her stories had appeared in Village Voice, Harper's and Ms. But Dancing on Coral was her debut book published there, and was described in Publishers Weekly as ''an exuberant first novel, wickedly funny and profoundly serious, whose characters are at home with themselves and whose heroine charmingly combines innocence and perceptive wisdom''.

There was plenty of praise, but not all American critics understood Adams' dry humour. Roger Friedman's review in The New York Times said: ''Lark Watter is an unintentionally disagreeable heroine, and that's not good news. A scheming, kvetching twit with an opinion about everything… Lark's shrillness is unremitting and builds to a high pitch whenever the United States meets with her disapproval. When she has so little regard for the new life she has created, it is hard to expect readers to care.''

Adams must have known then that she would always be an Australian abroad. Her spirited letter to the editor of the Times was cheered by her friends but would only have convinced Friedman that he was right: ''Roger Friedman was so busy 'kvetching' in his 'shrill' review of my novel Dancing on Coral that he seems not to have had time to read the book. In the few lines he spared for the substance of the novel he made four errors in identifying and describing the characters. The real 'twit' here may well be the reviewer.'' At home, the novel's admirers included Elizabeth Jolley, Kate Grenville, Marion Halligan, Don Anderson and Barbara Jefferis, who wrote, ''There is no other Australian novelist writing at present with such a finely judged mixture of zany wit and unforced wisdom, with such a control of character and material, such urbanity and exuberance.''

Dancing on Coral won the 1987 Miles Franklin Award against competition from Murray Bail, Nicholas Hasluck, David Ireland and Nancy Phelan. Even so, Adams was punished for having run away. The novel was also chosen as the winner of the NSW Premier's Literary Award for fiction, but the Ministry for the Arts withheld the $10,000 prize money on the grounds that Adams lived overseas; instead she received a medal - an insult that did not pay any bills. Adams told The Sydney Morning Herald she was disappointed rather than furious, but many people were outraged and the conditions of the awards were changed the next year.

The prospect of a secure job brought Adams back to Australia in 1990. Despite the success of her third novel, Longleg, living as a full-time writer was impossible, so she had also built a career as a creative writing teacher at Columbia and at Sarah Lawrence College. She jumped at the offer of a full-time role at the University of Technology, Sydney. Her daughter was independent at 19 and her mother, still in the family house at Eastwood, was in decline.

Over the next decade, while playing a prominent role in developing Australia's creative writing courses at UTS and beyond, Adams helped her brother care for their mother until she died. (Their father had taken his own life when Adams was 19, an event that haunts her fiction.)

Life was unexpectedly full in Sydney. Adams found love with a new partner and published a Gothic novel, The Tempest of Clemenza. She wrote for theatre and television, and had another novel under way when she died of cancer in 2007, far too young at 67. Later that year she was awarded the Australian Society of Authors Medal for her significant contribution as a writer and teacher.

But the following year the critic Katharine England lamented in The Australian how hard it was to find copies of Adams' books. ''I am sad on her behalf and on behalf of all those readers who will never get the chance to read her,'' England wrote. At last, here's another chance.

This is the edited introduction to the Text Classic edition of Dancing on Coral by Glenda Adams, to be published on June 26, $12.95.