Mary McCarthy

Abstract

Mary McCarthy (b. 1912–d. 1989) was an American essayist, novelist, critic, and public intellectual known for her biting satire and incisive criticism. From the 1930s to 1980s, her book reviews and other essays appeared in periodicals such as Partisan Review, Harper’s, The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. The Group, McCarthy’s 1963 novel about the lives of eight Vassar College graduates, was considered scandalous for its satirical and frank depiction of sex, contraception, and the private lives of women; it is now regarded as a classic of postwar fiction. Born in Seattle to an Irish-Catholic father and half-Jewish, half-Protestant mother, Mary McCarthy was the oldest of four children. She was six years old when her parents died in 1918 during the flu epidemic. In Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), she recalls the shock of becoming an orphan followed by years of abuse at the hands of sadistic guardians and her loss of religious faith at age twelve. McCarthy attended Vassar and graduated in 1933. Soon she married an aspiring playwright (whom she would divorce three years later) and grew close to a circle of leftist intellectuals that included Dwight Macdonald, William Phillips, Philip Rahv, and Nicola Chiaromonte. She married the critic Edmund Wilson in 1938; the same year, the couple had one son, Reuel. In the midst of their tumultuous marriage, McCarthy––with Wilson’s encouragement––published her first work of fiction, The Company She Keeps (1942). One of the collection’s stories, “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt,” was considered daring for its description of the heroine’s casual sexual encounter with a married Midwestern businessman in a Pullman car. In the 1940s and 1950s, McCarthy’s record, at once finely observed and satirically recreated, of political, social, and indeed conjugal life in America, gained recognition in works such as The Oasis (1949), The Groves of Academe (1952), and A Charmed Life (1955). By the time of the publication of The Group in 1963, McCarthy had left New York to live in Paris, France and Castine, Maine. She contributed regularly to the New York Review of Books, including reports on the Vietnam War and Watergate hearings. She also published two more novels, Birds of America (1971) and Cannibals and Missionaries (1979). In a much discussed cause célèbre, McCarthy accused Lillian Hellman of being a “dishonest writer” on a live recording of the Dick Cavett Show in 1980; Hellman sued for libel but died before the case could go to trial.