Mary McCarthy (author)

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.

McCarthy's 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.

Their feud began in the late 1930s over ideological differences, and was rooted in McCarthy's belief in the innocence of the defendants in the Moscow Trials during the Great Purge and Hellman's unyielding and uncritical support for Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin.

In New York, she moved in "fellow-traveling" Communist circles early in the 1930s, but by the latter half of the decade she had sided firmly with the anti-Stalinist Left.

She accordingly expressed solidarity with Leon Trotsky and his followers after the witch hunt targeting them culminated in the Moscow Trials.

McCarthy also vigorously countered playwrights and authors she considered to be adherents of 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, defending the necessity for a creative autonomy that transcends any ideology.

During the early Cold War, McCarthy was a critic of both McCarthyism and Communism.

It includes her celebrated short story "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt" which Partisan Review published in 1941.

It recounts the sexual encounter of a young bohemian intellectual woman and a middle-aged businessman encountered in the club car of a train.

Although she finds him fat and grey, she is intrigued by his elegant Brooks Brothers shirts and his knowledge of literary figures.

The story depicts—shockingly for the literary fiction of the era—not only the act of a woman choosing to engage in casual sex with a complete stranger but, more importantly, how that act is rooted in the complexity of her character.

McCarthy taught at Bard College from 1946 to 1947, and again between 1986 and 1989.

She also taught a winter semester in 1948 at Sarah Lawrence College.

McCarthy left the Catholic Church as a young woman, becoming an atheist.

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.

McCarthy was the winner of the Horizon Prize in 1949 and was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships, in 1949 and 1959.

She was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome.

Randall Jarrell's 1954 novel Pictures from an Institution is said to be about McCarthy's year teaching at Sarah Lawrence.

McCarthy's feud with fellow writer Lillian Hellman formed the basis for the play Imaginary Friends by Nora Ephron.

She maintained her commitment to social democratic critiques of culture and power until the end of her life, opposing the Vietnam War in the 1960s and covering the Watergate scandal hearings in the 1970s.

After building a reputation as a satirist and critic, McCarthy enjoyed popular success when the 1963 edition of her 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.

In 1967 and 1968, McCarthy travelled to North and South Vietnam, to report on the war from an anti-war perspective.

She documented her observations in two books: Vietnam, and Hanoi.

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.

She wrote favorably about the Viet Cong.

McCarthy visited North Vietnam in March 1968, only a month after the Tet Offensive created havoc in South Vietnam.

In 1973, she delivered the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, the Netherlands, under the title Can There Be a Gothic Literature? The same year she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

After Arendt's passing, McCarthy became Arendt's literary executor, serving from 1976 until her own death in 1989.

As executor, McCarthy prepared Arendt's unfinished manuscript The Life of the Mind for publication.

McCarthy further provoked Hellman in 1979, when she said on The Dick Cavett Show: "every word [Hellman] writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'."

Hellman responded with a $2.5 million lawsuit against McCarthy for alleged libel.

Observers of the trial noted the irony of Hellman's defamation suit was that it brought significant scrutiny.

It resulted in a serious decline of Hellman's reputation, as McCarthy and her supporters worked to prove that Hellman had lied.

She won the National Medal for Literature and the Edward MacDowell Medal in 1984.

McCarthy held honorary degrees from Bard, Bowdoin, Colby, Smith College, Syracuse University, the University of Maine at Orono, the University of Aberdeen, and the University of Hull.

The case was dropped shortly after Hellman died in 1984.

Although McCarthy broke ranks with some of her Partisan Review colleagues when they swerved toward conservative politics after World War II, she carried on lifelong friendships with Dwight Macdonald, Nicola Chiaromonte, Philip Rahv, F. W. Dupee 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.