Mary McCarthy (author)

For the former CIA employee Mary O'Neil McCarthy, see Mary McCarthy (former CIA employee).

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

Early life

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, Minnesota 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.

Beliefs as an adult

She left the Catholic church as a young woman when she became an atheist. In her 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 1930s, but by the latter half of the decade she had repudiated the soviet government, expressing solidarity with Leon 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 critiques of culture and power to the end of her life, arguing against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and covering the Watergate scandal hearings in the 1970s.

Social life

She married four times. Her best-known spouse was the writer and critic Edmund Wilson, whom she married in 1938 after leaving her lover Philip Rahv, and by whom she had a son, Reuel Wilson, an academic at the University of Western Ontario.

Though she broke ranks with some of her Partisan Review colleagues as they swerved toward conservative and reactionary politics after World War II, 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.

Literary reputation

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 1930s 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 formed the basis for the play Imaginary Friends by Nora Ephron. McCarthy had provoked the issue when, in 1979, she famously said on The Dick Cavett Show: "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. Muriel Gardiner claims that Hellman's memoir, Pentimento (1973), was partly based on a fictionalized account of Gardiner's life, the claim was denied by Hellman.

McCarthy was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She won the National Medal for Literature and the MacDowell Medal in 1984. McCarthy died of cancer on October 25, 1989 in New York City at the age of 77.

Selected works

• The Company She Keeps (1942), Harvest/HBJ, 2003 reprint:ISBN 0156027860
• The Oasis (1949), Backinprint.com, 1999 edition:ISBN 1583483926
• The Groves of Academe (1952), Harvest/HBJ, 2002 reprint:ISBN 0156027879
• A Charmed Life (1955), Harvest Books, 1992 reprint:ISBN 0156167743
• Venice Observed (1956), Harvest/HBJ, 1963 edition:ISBN 015693521X (the 1963 edition lacks the illustrations present in the original book)
• The Stones of Florence (1956), Harvest/HBJ, 2002 reprint of 1963 edition:ISBN 0156027631 (the 1963 edition lacks the illustrations present in the original book)
• Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), Harvest/HBJ, 1972 reprint:ISBN 0156586509 (autobiography)
• The Group (1962), Harvest/HBJ, 1991 reprint:ISBN 0156372088, adapted as a 1966 movie of the same name.
• Vietnam (1967)
• The Writing on the Wall (1970)
• Birds of America (1971), Harcourt 1992 reprint:ISBN 0156126303
• The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits (1974)
• Cannibals and Missionaries (1979), Harvest/HBJ, 1991 reprint:ISBN 0156153866 (novel explores the psychology of terrorism)
• Ideas and the Novel (1980)
• How I Grew (1987), Harvest Books, ISBN 0156421852 (intellectual autobiography age 13–21)
• Intellectual Memoirs (1992)

Books about McCarthy

• Sabrina Fuchs Abrams, Mary Mccarthy: Gender, Politics, And The Postwar Intellectual, (2004), Peter Lang Publishing, ISBN 082046807X
• Frances Kiernan, Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy, (2000), W.W. Norton, ISBN 0393323072
• Eve Stwertka (editor), Twenty-Four Ways of Looking at Mary McCarthy: The Writer and Her Work, (1996), Greenwood Press, ISBN 0313297762
• Carol Brightman (editor), Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949-1975, (1996), Harvest/HBJ, ISBN 0156002507
• Carol Brightman, Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy And Her World, (1992), Harvest Books, ISBN 0156000679
• Joy Bennet, Mary McCarthy; An Annotated Bibliography, (1992), Garland Press, ISBN 0824070283
• Carol Gelderman, Mary McCarthy: A Life, 1990, St Martins Press, ISBN 0312005652

External links

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