Mary McCarthy (author)

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For the former CIA employee Mary O'Neil McCarthy, see Mary McCarthy (CIA).
Mary McCarthy
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Mary McCarthy

Mary Therese McCarthy (June 21, 1912 – October 25, 1989) was an American author and critic. She was politically active for many years.

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[edit] Early life

Born in Seattle, Washington, McCarthy was orphaned at the age of six when both her parents died in the great flu epidemic of 1918. She was 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: her Jewish grandmother, Augusta Morganstern and her Protestant grandfather, Harold Preston, a prominent attorney and co-founder of the law firm today known as Preston Gates & Ellis, LLP. 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 successful 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.

[edit] Beliefs as an adult

She 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 had 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 and The New Republic, 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, arguing against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and covering the Watergate scandal hearings in the 1970s.

[edit] 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, an academic at the University of Western Ontario.

Though she broke ranks with some of her Partisan Review colleagues as they swerved toward conservative and reactionary 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.

[edit] 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 difference, particularly the question of the Moscow Trials and 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.) McCarthy's biographers have noted that the resulting irony of Hellman's defamation suit is that she brought more significant disrepute upon herself by forcing McCarthy and her supporters to prove that she was a liar in court. Muriel Gardiner claims that Hellman's memoir, Pentimento (1973), was partly based on a fictionalized account of Gardiner's life. The claim was denied by Hellman.

McCarthy was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She won the National Medal for Literature and the MacDowell Medal in 1984. McCarthy died of lung cancer on October 25, 1989 in New York City at the age of 77.

[edit] Notes

    [edit] Selected works

    [edit] 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

    [edit] External links

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