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During the Watergate hearings, McCarthy wrote eight rep...)
During the Watergate hearings, McCarthy wrote eight reports telling of deceit and arrogance in the Nixon administration. She revised and amplified those reports for this book and added a Postscript on the Nixon pardon.
Mary McCarthy: Novels & Stories 1942-1963 (LOA #290): The Company She Keeps / The Oasis / The Groves of Academe / A Charmed Life / stories (The Library of America)
(In the first volume of the definitive edition of her fict...)
In the first volume of the definitive edition of her fiction, four novels and eight classic stories by the witty and provocative writer who defined a generation.
Seventy-five years ago Mary McCarthy provoked a scandal with her electrifying debut novel, The Company She Keeps (1942), announcing the arrival of a major new voice in American literature. A candid, thinly-veiled portrait of the late-1930s New York intellectual scene, its penetrating gaze and creative fusion of life and literature--"mutual plagiarism," she called it--became the hallmark of McCarthy's fiction, which the Library of America now presents in full for the first time in deluxe collector's edition. The Oasis (1949), a wicked satire about a failed utopian community, and The Groves of Academe (1952), a pioneering campus novel depicting the insular and often absurd world of academia, burnished her reputation as an acerbic truth-teller, but it was with A Charmed Life (1955), a searing story of small-town infidelity, that McCarthy fully embraced the frank and avant-garde treatment of gender and sexuality that would inspire generations of readers and writers. Also included are all eight of McCarthy's short stories, four from her collection Cast a Cold Eye (1950), and four collected here for the first time.
Mary McCarthy: The Complete Fiction (The Library of America)
(For the first time in a deluxe collector's edition, all s...)
For the first time in a deluxe collector's edition, all seven novels and eight classic stories by the witty and provocative writer who defined a generation
Seventy-five years ago Mary McCarthy provoked a scandal with her electrifying debut novel, The Company She Keeps (1942), announcing the arrival of a major new voice in American literature. A candid, thinly-veiled portrait of the late-1930s New York intellectual scene, its penetrating gaze and creative fusion of life and literature--"mutual plagiarism," she called it--became the hallmark of McCarthy's fiction, which the Library of America now presents in full for the first time in deluxe collector's edition. The Oasis (1949), a wicked satire about a failed utopian community, and The Groves of Academe (1952), a pioneering campus novel depicting the insular and often absurd world of academia, burnished her reputation as an acerbic truth-teller, but it was with A Charmed Life (1955), a searing story of small-town infidelity, that McCarthy fully embraced the frank and avant-garde treatment of gender and sexuality that would inspire generations of readers and writers. In McCarthy's most famous novel, The Group (1963), she depicts the lives of eight Vassar College graduates during the 1930s as they grapple with sex, sexism, money, motherhood, and family. McCarthy's final two novels--Birds of America (1971), a coming of age tale of 19-year-old Peter Levi, who travels to Europe during the 1960s, and Cannibals and Missionaries (1979), a thriller about a group of passengers taken hostage on an airplane by militant hijackers--are both concerned with the state of modern society, from the cross-currents of radical social change to the psychology of terrorism. Also included are all eight of McCarthy's short stories, four from her collection Cast a Cold Eye (1950), and four collected here for the first time. As a special feature, the second volume contains McCarthy's 1979 essay "The Novels that Got Away," on her unfinished fiction.
The American writer Mary T. McCarthy wrote novels and short stories as well as reportage, autobiographical essays, theater criticism, political essays, and art history.
Background
Mary Therese McCarthy was born on June 21, 1912, in Seattle, Washington, to Roy and Therese Preston McCarthy. Her father was a lawyer. Kevin McCarthy, the actor, was her brother. Her parents died of the 1918 flu epidemic when she was six years old. For awhile she was raised by an abusive uncle in Minnesota; later she escaped into the care of her grandfather.
Education
Mary was educated at school in a convent and at Vassar College, where she graduated in 1933 with an A. B. While there, she helped found a literary magazine with three classmates, all of whom went on to become important persons in American writing: Elizabeth Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser, and Eleanor Clark.
Her honorary degrees included doctorates in letters from Syracuse University, 1973; the University of Hull, in England, 1974; and Bard College, 1976. She had doctorates in literature from Bowdoin College, 1981, and from the University of Maine, 1982. The University of Aberdeen, Scotland, awarded her a Doctor of Laws in 1979.
Career
After graduation she taught briefly at Bard and Sarah Lawrence colleges.
She began her career in New York holding various jobs: as an editor for magazines and publishing houses; as a writer for the radio commentator H. V. Kaltenborn; as an assistant to the political analyst Benjamin Stolberg; and writing promotion for an art gallery. Most significant, however, were her reviews for The Nation and The New Republic, at that time both leftist journals. She came to prominence with an article charging that the major New York critics and reviewers, including Joseph Wood Krutch, who was on the board of editors of The Nation, were in the habit of writing shallow appraisals that merely provided publicity to encourage business. She was later to exempt Krutch from this charge and still later to remark that her early opinions were "insufferably patronizing. "
She soon joined Partisan Review, the leftist political and intellectual journal, as an editor whose main assignment was to write drama reviews. McCarthy is equally famous for her fiction-novels and short stories-and for her non-fiction, which includes reportage, autobiographical essays, theater criticism, political essays, and art history.
She is generally supposed to have begun writing her fiction under the encouragement of Edmund Wilson, her second husband. The Groves of Academe; a novel published in 1952, recounts how an incompetent professor on a small, elite campus keeps from being fired by claiming, falsely, to be a member of the Communist Party. He thus makes it impossible for the liberal president to dismiss him lest he be charged with being reactionary.
The Group (1963), a novel about eight classmates from Vassar who make their way after graduation in the business and intellectual world of New York, was made into a popular movie which starred Candice Bergen and Hal Holbrook, among others.
Her other novels included The Company She Keeps (1942); The Oasis (1949); A Charmed Life (1955); Birds of America (1971); and Cannibals and Missionaries (1979).
Cast a Cold Eye (1950) was the title of her first collection of short stories, although some critics regard her first novel, The Company She Keeps, as really being a gathering of separate stories with the same characters.
McCarthy's theater reviews were first collected under the title Sights and Spectacles (1956) and later, somewhat expanded, as Mary McCarthy's Theatre Chronicles: 1937-1962 (1963). One of her memorable essays, a review of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, was entitled "The Unimportance of Being Oscar. "
The New Yorker magazine, which had first published her short stories, including the classic "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt, " also published her autobiographical essays, which were later collected under the title Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957). Her collections of literary and occasional essays include: On the Contrary (1961); The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays (1970); Ideas and the Novel (1980); and Occasional Prose (1985).
All of her books continued to be reprinted, in whole or in part, sometimes under other titles, sometimes with several titles combined under a new one, both in the United States and in England through the 1980s. They were also widely translated.
Among McCarthy's most striking efforts were her reports of public events in the tradition of such other great women writers of the late 20th century as Hannah Arendt and Rebecca West. Her reports from Vietnam, many first published in the New York Review of Books, appeared in three books (Vietnam, Hanoi, and Medina) that were subsequently collected under the title The Seventeenth Degree (1974). Her other book of reportage is The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits (1974). She also published monumental studies of Italian Renaissance art, Venice Observed (1956) and The Stones of Florence (1959). These were combined in a Penguin paperback in 1979.
McCarthy died of cancer in October, 1989, in New York. She was 77.
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A penetrating work of reportage on Venice. Searching o...)
Religion
Her unhappiness with her orthodox Roman Catholic relatives in Minnesota did not erase her interest in Catholicism, which lasted long after she lost her faith.
Views
Quotations:
"As a writer, I am troubled by the fact that most American plays are so badly written. "
"We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story. "
"Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism. "
"You mustn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex. "
Membership
She was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome. In 1973 she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Personality
The prolific McCarthy may have been the most important and widely-ranging woman writer of the latter half of the 20th century, and certainly was one of the period's most important political writers without regard to gender, to be ranked in the company of George Orwell and Albert Camus. McCarthy's work is noted for its sharpness of observation and expression, its wit, its independence of mind, and its unflagging intellectual excitement. From her comments about characters in her fiction, her candid recollections of her childhood, and her unsparing reports of news events it is plain that she abhorred distortion, shallowness, and sentimentality. These tastes and convictions, no doubt, inspired her attacks on Lillian Hellman as writer and polemicist, which, in turn, prompted Hellman's famous libel suit against McCarthy. On Hellman's death, her estate dropped the suit. McCarthy was generally so insistent on seeing her subjects with absolute clarity that she was often charged with lacking the fiction writer's capacity to blur and shade his or her raw material in the cause of the mystery inherent in all reality. She was, for example, called an "essayist" in all of her writing, both in admiration and to suggest her limitations.
Quotes from others about the person
"Had she been an active figure in the magazine, her presence might very well have overshadowed everyone else's and this memoir would accordingly have had to take a different shape. I am rather glad that she was not, for it would require three volumes at least to begin to do justice to this extraordinary woman - one of the most extraordinary, I believe, of our time. " - William Barrett
"She lacks the essential gift: She cannot imagine others. " - Hilton Kramer
Connections
She was married four times, to Harold Johnsrud, playwright and actor, from 1933 to 1936; to Edmund Wilson, novelist and critic, from 1938 to 1946; to Bowden Broadwater, a sometimes writer and publisher's person, from 1946 to 1961; and to James Raymond West, a U. S. State Department official, in 1961. She had a son, Reuel Kimball Wilson, born in 1938.