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Mary Therese McCarthy (June 21, 1912 – October 25, 1989) was an American novelist, critic and political activist, best known for her novel The Group, her marriage to critic Edmund Wilson, and her storied feud with playwright Lillian Hellman. [1]
Oct 21, 2024 · Mary McCarthy 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
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Mary McCarthy (1912-1989) is one of the leading American women intellectuals of the twentieth century who is known for her sharp wit and keen perception of the American intellectual landscape. A fiction writer, cultural critic, and political commentator, McCarthy is associated with the anti-Stalinist liberal magazine, Partisan Review, in the 1930s and 40s.
- Early Life and Education
- Strong Beliefs
- Marriages and Teaching
- A Literary Life
- The Group
- Friendships and Feuds
- More About Mary Mccarthy
McCarthy was orphaned at the age of six when both her parents died in the flu epidemic of 1918. She and her brothers, Kevin, Preston, and Sheridan, were raised in unhappy circumstances by an authoritarian uncle and aunt who inflicted harsh treatment and abuse. Fortunately, McCarthy and her siblings were eventually taken in by her maternal grandpare...
Fresh out of Vassar, McCarthy caught the attention of the literary world with her essay, “Our Critics, Right or Wrong,” in which she scathingly commented on the mediocrity of American book reviewers. In New York during the 1930s, she moved in “fellow-traveling” Communist circles, left the Catholic Church, and became an atheist. As founding editor o...
McCarthy married four times. In 1933 she married Harald Johnsrud, an actor and playwright. Next, she married well-known writer and critic Edmund Wilson in 1938, after leaving her then-lover Philip Rahy. She and Wilson had a son, Reuel Wilson. In 1946, she married Bowden Broadwater, who worked at the New Yorker. Finally, in 1961, McCarthy married ca...
The Company She Keeps (1942), McCarthy’s debut novel, received critical acclaim for its blunt appraisal of the social lives of New York intellectuals of the time. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood(1957) is a classic in the genre of memoir. After building a reputation as a satirist and critic, McCarthy enjoyed popular success when her 1963 novel The G...
McCarthy’s best-known novel,The Group,was published in 1954. It made the New York Times Bestseller List in 1963 and remained there for almost two years. The book follows the lives of eight young female friends newly graduated from Vassar College in 1933 and their struggles with sexism in the workplace, childrearing, finances, family crises, and int...
Her famous 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. 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 respo...
On this site 1. Mary McCarthy Quotes with a Critical Eye Selected fiction and nonfiction 1. The Company She Keeps(1942) 2. The Oasis(1949) 3. The Groves of Academe (1952) 4. The Group(1954) 5. Venice Observed (1956) 6. The Stones of Florence (1959) 7. Vietnam(1967) 8. Hanoi(1968) 9. The Writing on the Wall(1970) 10. Birds of America (1971) 11. Cann...
Mary Therese McCarthy was born on June 21, 1912, in Seattle, the daughter of Roy Winfield McCarthy, a member of a prominent Roman Catholic family in Minneapolis, and the former Therese Preston, whose father, a transplanted New Englander, was one of Seattle's most successful lawyers.
On 25 October 1989, McCarthy died of cancer at New York Hospital. At the time of her death, she was working on the second volume of her autobiography, published posthumously in 1992 as Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936-1938. Mary McCarthy was the author of twenty-eight books during her lifetime, both fiction and non-fiction.
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People note American writer Mary Therese McCarthy for her sharp literary criticism and satirical fiction, including the novels The Groves of Academe (1952) and The Group (1963). McCarthy studied at Vassar college in Poughkeepsie, New York and graduated in 1933.
