Mary McCarthy

Mary McCarthy (born June 21, 1912, Seattle, Washington, U.S.—died October 25, 1989, Manhattan, New York) was an American critic and novelist whose fiction is noted for its wit and acerbity in analyzing the finer moral nuances of intellectual dilemmas.

McCarthy, whose family belonged to all three major American religious traditions—Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish—was left an orphan at age six. After her parents’ deaths, she spent several years with strict Roman Catholic relatives in Minnesota before going to live with her grandparents in Seattle under conditions she found more pleasant. Her unhappy experience with her devout relatives in Minnesota did not erase her interest in Catholicism, which lasted long after she had lost her faith.

McCarthy was educated at private schools and at Vassar College (B.A., 1933). She then worked as a critic for The New Republic, The Nation, and the Partisan Review. From 1937 to 1948 she served on the editorial staff of the Partisan Review, for which she wrote extensively on art, theater, travel, and politics. She married four times, the second time, in 1938, to the noted American critic Edmund Wilson, who encouraged her to begin writing fiction.

As both a novelist and a critic, McCarthy was noted for her bitingly satiric commentaries on marriage, sexual expression, the impotence of intellectuals, and the role of women in contemporary urban America. Her first story, “Cruel and Barbarous Treatment,” was published in the Southern Review in 1939. It later became the opening chapter of The Company She Keeps (1942), a loosely connected series of semi-autobiographical stories concerning a fashionable woman who experiences divorce and psychoanalysis. The Oasis (1949; also published as Source of Embarrassment) is a short novel about the failure of a utopian community of idealistic intellectuals. In The Groves of Academe (1952), McCarthy satirized American higher education during the Joseph McCarthy era. In 1956 and 1959 McCarthy experimented with lavishly photographed travelogues of Italy in Venice, Observed and The Stones of Florence.

Her Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), which is autobiographical, was highly praised by critics. It was followed by The Group (1963), the novel for which McCarthy is perhaps best known. The book, which focuses on eight Vassar women from the class of 1933 through their subsequent careers and the intellectual fads of the 1930s and ’40s, became the most popular of all her works and was made into a film directed by Sidney Lumet in 1966.

After traveling to North and South Vietnam, McCarthy wrote a controversial series of essays on the Vietnam War, which first appeared in the New York Review of Books and was later collected in Vietnam (1967) and Hanoi (1968). Her other books include the novel Birds of America (1971); The Mask of State (1974), on the Watergate scandal; Cannibals and Missionaries (1979), a novel; and How I Grew (1987), a second volume of autobiography.

In 1980 her decades of enmity with American playwright Lillian Hellman culminated in a libel lawsuit after McCarthy called Hellman “tremendously overrated, a bad writer, and [a] dishonest writer” on The Dick Cavett Show.

An unfinished autobiography, Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936–38, was published posthumously in 1992. Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949–1975 (1995) is a record of McCarthy’s long friendship with the German-born American political scientist and philosopher Hannah Arendt.