Mary McCarthy

by

Sophia Wilson Niehaus

• LAST MODIFIED: 23 September 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0252

Introduction

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.

General Overviews

Each of the works listed here provides an overview of Mary McCarthy’s life and work. Readers will find a trove of information in the short interviews anthologized in Gelderman 1991, especially Sifton 1962. Insightful consideration of her nonfiction is found in Mallon 2002, and of her fiction in Gornick 2021. Stock 1968 and Hardy 1996 are both useful introductions to McCarthy for new readers. The most up-to-date information concerning Mary McCarthy scholarship and publications can be found on the Mary McCarthy Society website.

• Gelderman, Carol W., ed. Conversations with Mary McCarthy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991.

  Collection of interviews with Mary McCarthy culled from publications in America and abroad. Interviewers include Michiko Kakutani, then the book critic for the New York Times, the French intellectual Jean-François Revel, and her brother, the actor Kevin McCarthy. Features an important Paris Review interview by Elisabeth Niebuhr. An essential resource for scholars.

• Gornick, Vivian. “Mary McCarthy.” In Taking a Long Look : Essays on Culture, Literature, and Feminism in Our Time. By Vivian Gornick, 53–62. New York: Verso, 2021.

  Brilliant essay that also served as an introduction to a 2013 edition of The Oasis, a novella found in (McCarthy 2017, cited under Fiction). Gornick reflects on the place of McCarthy in American literary history and contextualizes McCarthy’s satire within the intellectual circle of the Partisan Review.

• Hardy, W. S. Mary McCarthy. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1996.

  Scholarly consideration of McCarthy’s fiction and nonfiction aimed at secondary school or undergraduate students, who may find its plot summaries and general overview a useful starting point.

• Mallon, Thomas. ““Our Saint, Our Umpire”.” Atlantic Monthly 290 (2002): 128–135.

  Review written by Mallon, a novelist and critic who edited the Library of America’s edition of McCarthy’s fiction (McCarthy 2017, cited under Fiction) of A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays, a volume of McCarthy’s nonfiction essays edited by A.O. Scott. Discusses with keen insight her early, influential essays on realism, the evolution of her political writing, and later literary criticism.

• The Mary McCarthy Society.

  The website of the Mary McCarthy Society, a division of the American Literature Association and an affiliate of the Vassar College Library Special Collections, lists all of Mary McCarthy’s published works with links to digital editions. It is updated regularly with new editions such as anthologies, foreign translations, and scholarly publications. It also contains a bibliography and an archive of many of McCarthy’s television interviews from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

• Stock, Irvin. Mary McCarthy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1968.

  Slender booklet that provides some rich insights into McCarthy’s writing up to the 1960s. Identifies the ethical and literary questions that shape McCarthy’s writing––the early fiction in particular. Informative on questions of style and context.