Mary McCarthy (author)

Mary Therese McCarthy (June 21 1912 - October 25 1989) was an American author and critic. She was politically active in left-wing politics for many years.

Born in Seattle, Washington, McCarthy was orphaned at the age of six when both her parents died in the great flu epidemic of 1918. She was raised in very unhappy circumstances by her Catholic father's parents in Minneapolis under the direct care of an Uncle and Aunt she remembered for harsh treatment and abuse. When the situation became intolerable, she was taken in by her maternal grandparents in Seattle: her Jewish grandmother, Augusta Morganstern and her Protestant grandfather, Harold Preston. McCarthy explores the complex events of her early life in Minneapolis and her coming of age in Seattle in her successful memoir, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. Her actor brother, Kevin McCarthy went on to star in such movies as Death of a Salesman (1951) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

Under the guardianship of the Prestons, McCarthy studied at the Annie Wright Seminary in Tacoma, and went on to graduate from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1933. She left the Catholic Church as a young woman when she became an atheist. In her typical contrarian fashion, McCarthy treasured her religious education for the classical foundation it provided her intellect while at the same time she depicted her loss of faith and her contests with religious authority as essential to her character. In New York, she moved in "fellow-traveling" Communist circles early in the thirties, but by the latter half of the decade she had repudiated Soviet-style Communism, expressing solidarity with Trotsky after the Moscow Trials, and vigorously countering playwrights and authors she considered to be sympathetic to Stalinism. As part of the Partisan Review circle and as a contributor to The Nation and The New Republic, she garnered attention as a cutting critic, advocating the neccessity for creative autonomy that transcends doctrine. During the 1940s and 1950s she became a liberal critic of both McCarthyism and Communism. She maintained her commitment to liberal criticiques of culture and power to the end of her life, arguing against the Vietnam War in the sixties and covering the Watergate hearings in the seventies.

She married several times. Her best-known spouse was the writer and critic Edmund Wilson, whom she married in 1938 after leaving, her then lover, Philip Rahv. Though she broke ranks with some of her Partisan Review colleagues as they swerved toward conservative and reactionary politics after World War Two, she carried on life-long friendships with Dwight Macdonald, Nicola Chiaromonte, Philip Rahv and Elizabeth Hardwick. Perhaps most prized of all was her close friendship with Hannah Arendt, with whom she maintained a sizable correspondence widely regarded for its intellectual rigor.

Her debut novel ,The Company She Keeps received critical acclaim as a succéss-de-scandale, depicting the social milieu of New York intellectuals of the late 1930's with unreserved frankness. After building a reputation as a satirist and critic, McCarthy enjoyed popular success when her 1963 novel The Group remained on The New York Times best-seller list for almost two years. Her work is noted for its precise prose and its complex mixture of autobiography and fiction.

Her feud with fellow writer Lillian Hellman went on in public for decades, and formed the basis for the play Imaginary Friends by Nora Ephron. McCarthy famously said on The Dick Cavett Show that "every word (Hellman) writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'." Hellman responded by filing a $2.5 million libel suit against McCarthy but died before it reached a conclusion. [1]

It was assumed that the lawsuit would end with Hellman's death, but it did not--ending only with McCarthy's death in 1989, 5 years after Hellman died.

McCarthy won the National Medal for Literature and the MacDowell Medal in 1984 and died of cancer on October 25, 1989 in New York City at the age of 77.

Selected works

• The Company She Keeps (1942)
• The Oasis (1949)
• The Groves of Academe (1952)
• A Charmed Life (1955)
• Venice Observed (1956)
• Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957)
• The Stones of Florence (1959)
• The Group (1962), later made into a 1966 movie of the same name.
• Vietnam (1967)
• The Writing on the Wall (1970)
• Birds of America (1971)
• The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits (1974)
• Cannibals and Missionaries (1979)
• Ideas and the Novel (1980)
• How I Grew (1987)
• Intellectual Memoirs (1992)

External links

• Literary Encyclopedia (in-progress)
• Brief bio at Kirjasto (Pegasos)
• Brief bio at Vassar College