Mary McCarthy

For more information on Mary Therese McCarthy, visit Britannica.com.

The American writer Mary T. McCarthy (1912-1989) wrote novels and short stories as well as reportage, autobiographical essays, theater criticism, political essays, and art history.

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; later she escaped into the care of her grandfather who sent her to school in a convent. Subsequently he provided for her education 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. After graduation she taught briefly at Bard and Sarah Lawrence colleges.

Wrote on Political Topics

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. "Had she been an active figure in the magazine," wrote William Barrett in his book about the publication, The Truants, "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."

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.

Novel Made into Movie

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.

Published Essays and Collections of Theater Reviews

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." "As a writer," she said in her introduction to Sights and Spectacles, " I am troubled by the fact that most American plays are so badly written."

Wrote in a Variety of Forms

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.

Pursuit for Clarity Brings Lawsuit Upon Her

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. "She lacks the essential gift: She cannot imagine others," wrote Hilton Kramer, the critic and editor.

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. She held two Guggenheim fellowships, in 1949-1950 and in 1959-1960; received the National Medal for Literature; and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Personal Life

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. She lived half the year in Paris, France, and half in the United States, in Maine.

McCarthy died of cancer in October, 1989, in New York. She was 77.

Further Reading

An extended though still compact survey of McCarthy's work may be found in Vol. 16 of Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series; Books about her life and work include Doris Grumbach, The Company She Kept: A Revealing Portrait of Mary McCarthy (1976); Irvin Stock, Mary McCarthy (1968); and Barbara McKenzie, Mary McCarthy (1966); The best sources for insight to McCarthy's life and work remain McCarthy's own works, especially the frankly autobiographical ones.

Also see Newsweek, November 6, 1989; National Review, November 24, 1989; Conversations with Mary McCarthy, University Press of Mississippi, 1991; Hardy, Willene Schaefer, Mary McCarthy/Willene Schaefer Hardy, F. Ungar Pub. Co., 1981.

Quotes:

"The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has an all too professional air."

"The Crucifixion and other historical precedents notwithstanding, many of us still believe that outstanding goodness is a kind of armor, that virtue, seen plain and bare, gives pause to criminality. But perhaps it is the other way around."

"The labor of keeping house is labor in its most naked state, for labor is toil that never finishes, toil that has to be begun again the moment it is completed, toil that is destroyed and consumed by the life process."

"Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior."

"We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story."

"The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is the fact that we tolerate conditions that are, from a negative point of view, intolerable. What the foreigner finds most objectionable in American life is its lack of basic comfort. No nation with any sense of material well-being would endure the food we eat, the cramped apartments we live in, the noise, the traffic, the crowded subways and buses. American life, in large cities, is a perpetual assault on the senses and the nerves; it is out of asceticism, out of unworldliness, precisely, that we bear it."

See more famous quotes by Mary Mccarthy

• Born: 1912 in Seattle, Washington
• Died: 1989
• Active: '60s, '90s
• Major Genres: Drama, Romance
• Career Highlights: The Group, Women and Men: Stories of Seduction
• First Major Screen Credit: The Group (1966)

Biography

Mary Therese McCarthy
Born	June 21, 1912(1912-06-21) Seattle, Washington
Died	October 25, 1989 (aged 77) NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital Manhattan
Cause of death	Lung cancer
Education	Vassar College
Spouse(s)	Harald Johnsrud (m. 1933) «start: (1933)»"Marriage: Harald Johnsrud to Mary McCarthy (author)" Location: (linkback:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_McCarthy_(author)) Edmund Wilson (m. 1938) «start: (1938)»"Marriage: Edmund Wilson to Mary McCarthy (author)" Location: (linkback:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_McCarthy_(author)) Bowden Broadwater (m. 1946–present) «start: (1946)»"Marriage: Bowden Broadwater to Mary McCarthy (author)" Location: (linkback:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_McCarthy_(author)) James West (m. 1961–present) «start: (1961)»"Marriage: James West to Mary McCarthy (author)" Location: (linkback:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_McCarthy_(author))

Mary Therese McCarthy (June 21, 1912 – October 25, 1989) was an American author, critic, and political activist.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Beliefs as an adult 3 Social life 4 Works 5 Literary reputation 6 Death 7 Notes 8 Selected works 8.1 Books about McCarthy 9 External links

Early life

Born in Seattle, Washington, to Roy Winfield McCarthy and his wife, the former Therese Preston, McCarthy was orphaned at the age of six when both her parents died in the great flu epidemic of 1918. She and her brothers, Kevin, Preston, and Sheridan were 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, Augusta Morganstern, who was Jewish, and Harold Preston, a prominent attorney and co-founder of the law firm Preston Gates & Ellis, who was an Episcopalian. (Her brothers were sent to boarding school.) McCarthy credited her grandfather, who helped draft one of the nation's first Workmen's Compensation Acts, with helping form her liberal views. McCarthy explores the complex events of her early life in Minneapolis and her coming of age in Seattle in her 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

McCarthy 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 repudiated Soviet-style Communism, 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, The New Republic, Harper's Magazine, and The New York Review of Books, she garnered attention as a cutting critic, advocating the necessity 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, opposing the Vietnam War in the 1960s and covering the Watergate scandal hearings in the 1970s.

Social life

She married four times. In 1933 she married Harald Johnsrud, an actor and would-be playwright. 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.

Although she broke ranks with some of her Partisan Review colleagues when they swerved toward conservative 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.

Works

She visited Vietnam a number of times during the Vietnam War. Interviewed after her first trip, she declared on British television that there was not a single documented case of the Viet Cong deliberately killing a South Vietnamese woman or child.^[1] She wrote favorably about the Vietcong.^[2]

Literary reputation

Her debut novel, The Company She Keeps received critical acclaim as a succès 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. The feud had simmered since the late 1930s over ideological differences, particularly the questions of the Moscow Trials and of Hellman's support for the "Popular Front" with Stalin. McCarthy provoked Hellman in 1979 when 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. (The suit ended shortly after Hellman died in 1984.) Observers of the trial noted that the resulting irony of Hellman's defamation suit is that it brought significant disrepute upon herself (Hellman) by forcing McCarthy and her supporters to prove that she was a liar in court.

McCarthy was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She won the National Medal for Literature and the Edward MacDowell Medal in 1984.

Death

McCarthy died of lung cancer on October 25, 1989 at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City.^[3]

Notes

1. ^ Leckie, Robert (1992). The Wars of America. Castle Books. 
2. ^ [1]
3. ^ "Mary McCarthy, 77, Is Dead; Novelist, Memoirist and Critic". New York Times. October 29, 1989. http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/26/specials/mccarthy-obit.html. Retrieved 2008-07-07. "Mary McCarthy, one of America's pre-eminent women of letters, died of cancer yesterday at New York Hospital. She was 77 years old and lived in Castine, Maine, and Paris." 

Selected works

• The Company She Keeps (1942), Harvest/HBJ, 2003 reprint:ISBN 0-15-602786-0
• The Oasis (1949), Backinprint.com, 1999 edition:ISBN 1-58348-392-6
• The Groves of Academe (1952), Harvest/HBJ, 2002 reprint:ISBN 0-15-602787-9
• A Charmed Life (1955), Harvest Books, 1992 reprint:ISBN 0-15-616774-3
• Venice Observed (1956), Harvest/HBJ, 1963 edition:ISBN 0-15-693521-X (the 1963 edition lacks the illustrations present in the original book)
• The Stones of Florence (1956), Harvest/HBJ, 2002 reprint of 1963 edition:ISBN 0-15-602763-1 (the 1963 edition lacks the illustrations present in the original book)
• Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), Harvest/HBJ, 1972 reprint:ISBN 0-15-658650-9 (autobiography)
• On the Contrary (1961)
• The Group (1962), Harvest/HBJ, 1991 reprint:ISBN 0-15-637208-8, adapted as a 1966 movie of the same name.
• Vietnam (1967)
• Hanoi (1968)
• The Writing on the Wall (1970)
• Birds of America (1971), Harcourt 1992 reprint:ISBN 0-15-612630-3
• Medina (1972)
• The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits (1974)
• Cannibals and Missionaries (1979), Harvest/HBJ, 1991 reprint:ISBN 0-15-615386-6 (novel explores the psychology of terrorism)
• Ideas and the Novel (1980)
• How I Grew (1987), Harvest Books, ISBN 0-15-642185-2 (intellectual autobiography age 13–21)
• Intellectual Memoirs (1992), published posthumously (edited and with a foreword by Elizabeth Hardwick)
• A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays (2002), New York Review Books, (compilation of essays and critiques), ISBN 1-59017-010-5

Books about McCarthy

• Sabrina Fuchs Abrams, Mary Mccarthy: Gender, Politics, And The Postwar Intellectual, (2004), Peter Lang Publishing, ISBN 0-8204-6807-X
• Frances Kiernan, Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy, (2000), W.W. Norton, ISBN 0-393-32307-2
• Eve Stwertka (editor), Twenty-Four Ways of Looking at Mary McCarthy: The Writer and Her Work, (1996), Greenwood Press, ISBN 0-313-29776-2
• Carol Brightman (editor), Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949-1975, (1996), Harvest/HBJ, ISBN 0-15-600250-7
• Carol Brightman, Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy And Her World, (1992), Harvest Books, ISBN 0-15-600067-9
• Joy Bennet, Mary McCarthy; An Annotated Bibliography, (1992), Garland Press, ISBN 0-8240-7028-3
• Carol Gelderman, Mary McCarthy: A Life, 1990, St Martins Press, ISBN 0-312-00565-2

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Mary McCarthy (author)

• New York Times Featured Author Page (Book Reviews, Interviews, Sound Clips.)
• Literary Encyclopedia (in-progress)
• Brief bio at Kirjasto (Pegasos)
• Brief bio at Vassar College
• Map of Mary's NYC, 1936-1938 based on Intellectual Memoirs

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