Mary McCarthy
June 21, 1912 — October 25, 1989
Mary Therese McCarthy was an American novelist, critic, essayist, and memoirist whose razor-sharp intellect and refusal to pull punches made her one of the most feared and admired literary figures of 20th-century America, equally celebrated for her fiction, her political journalism, and her wit.
An Orphan's Education
Born on June 21, 1912 in Seattle, Washington, McCarthy was orphaned at age six when both parents died in the 1918 influenza pandemic within days of each other. She and her three brothers were placed with guardians in Minneapolis, and her accounts of those years — published decades later as Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957) — paint a portrait of a childhood marked by cruelty, strict Catholicism, and the eventual intervention of enlightened grandparents who sent her to proper schools. She attended Vassar College in the early 1930s, graduated in 1933, married three times before age 30, and moved into New York's literary and political intellectual circles, where her intelligence and combativeness quickly made her a central figure. She wrote theater criticism for Partisan Review and The Nation and became closely associated with the anti-Stalinist left, part of the milieu that included Edmund Wilson (her third husband), Hannah Arendt (her closest friend), and Dwight Macdonald.
The Group and Literary Reputation
McCarthy's fiction attracted serious critical attention from her earliest collections, but her 1963 novel The Group brought her massive popular success. Following eight Vassar women from graduation in 1933 through the late 1930s, the novel's frank depictions of sexuality, female ambition, and the painful gap between idealism and experience made it a sensation, a bestseller, and a feminist touchstone before the feminist movement had fully formed. Its publication the same year as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique made 1963 a pivotal year for American women's cultural life. Her earlier work, including the roman à clef The Company She Keeps (1942), the political satire The Oasis (1949), and The Groves of Academe (1952), had established her as a formidable fiction writer; The Group made her a celebrity.
Did You Know?
McCarthy's long feud with Lillian Hellman culminated in one of American literary history's most famous exchanges. In a 1980 television interview, McCarthy said of Hellman: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'" Hellman sued for $2.25 million in damages. The case was never resolved — Hellman died in 1984 before it came to trial — but the quote has become permanently lodged in the history of American letters.
Political Journalism and Legacy
McCarthy traveled to Vietnam during the American war there and produced two book-length critiques, Vietnam (1967) and Hanoi (1968), that were among the most rigorous and independent assessments of the conflict published by any American writer. Her later works included The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits (1974), her close-up reporting on the Senate hearings, and Cannibals and Missionaries (1979). She died of lung cancer on October 25, 1989 in New York. The philosopher Hannah Arendt, her closest intellectual companion, had died fourteen years earlier; McCarthy spent years as Arendt's literary executor, editing and publishing her friend's posthumous work. McCarthy's fierceness, her refusal to flatter, and her insistence on intellectual honesty remain exemplary qualities that continue to influence critics and essayists.