Mary Mccarthy Popular Books

Mary Mccarthy Biography & Facts

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 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. 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. 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. Literary career and public life 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. 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.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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 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. Ideology 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. 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.: 113–130 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. 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. Opposition to Vietnam War 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 her book, Hanoi, McCarthy provides a rare English-language description of life in North Vietnam during the war. McCarthy describes an orderly society, in which everyone pitched in to help with the war effort. North Vietnam received advance warning of most bombing attacks and McCarthy regularly had to take cover from American bombs.McCarthy's visits to Vietnam were controversial. During her visit to North Vietnam, she met briefly with U.S. Air Force officer James Risner, who was being held as a prisoner of war by North Vietnam. Years later, after his release, Risner attacked McCarthy for her not having recognized that he had been tortured by the North Vietnamese while in custody. Personal life Born in Seattle, Washington to Roy Winfield McCarthy and his wife Martha Therese (née Preston), McCarthy and her three brothers were orphaned when both their parents died in the flu epidemic of 1918. She and her brothers, Kevin, Preston and Sheridan, were raised in very unhappy circumstances by her father's Irish Catholic parents in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and under the direct care of an uncle and aunt, whom she remembered for harsh treatment and abuse.When the situation became intolerable, McCarthy was taken in by her maternal grandparents in.... Discover the Mary Mccarthy popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Mary Mccarthy books.

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  • The Shores of Bohemia synopsis, comments

    The Shores of Bohemia

    John Taylor Williams

    An intimate portrait of a legendary generation of artists, writers, activists, and dreamers who created a utopia on the shores of Cape Cod during the first half of the twentieth ce...

  • The Venetian Empire synopsis, comments

    The Venetian Empire

    Jan Morris

    For six centuries the Republic of Venice was a maritime empire, its sovereign power extending throughout much of the eastern Mediterranean – an empire of coasts, islands and isolat...

  • The Collected Essays Volume Two synopsis, comments

    The Collected Essays Volume Two

    Mary McCarthy

    Candid, sharp, and entertaining essays from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood and a “delightfully polished writer” (The Atlantic Monthly)....

  • Cold Warriors synopsis, comments

    Cold Warriors

    Duncan White

    In this brilliant account of the literary war within the Cold War, novelists and poets become embroiled in a dangerous game of betrayal, espionage, and conspiracy at the heart of t...

  • Little Bighorn synopsis, comments

    Little Bighorn

    John Hough

    Little Bighorn is the beautifully written, uniquely American story of the comingofage of eighteenyearold Allen Winslow during the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the fraught weeks...

  • Erinnerungen an Bloomsbury synopsis, comments

    Erinnerungen an Bloomsbury

    Quentin Bell

    Wie lebte der legendäre BloomsburyKreis von Künstlern und Literaten um die Schwestern Virginia Woolf und Vanessa Bell? Quentin Bell hat alle von ihnen aus nächster Nähe kennenge...

  • The Forties synopsis, comments

    The Forties

    Edmund Wilson

    From one of the greatest literary critics of the twentieth century, this installment of Edmund Wilson’s private notebooks covers the years of the 1940s, providing a rich lens into ...

  • Freundschaft in finsteren Zeiten synopsis, comments

    Freundschaft in finsteren Zeiten

    Hannah Arendt & Matthias Bormuth

    Die politische Dimension der Freundschaft entfaltet Hannah Arendt in ihren klassisch gewordenen "Gedanken zu Lessing", die das gemeinsame Interesse an der Welt betonen. Den...

  • I Hope I Screw This Up synopsis, comments

    I Hope I Screw This Up

    Kyle Cease

    A New York Times bestseller! In this irreverently funny, oneofakind book, transformational comedian Kyle Cease shows you how to love failure and follow your heart, release the addi...

  • Die Clique synopsis, comments

    Die Clique

    Mary McCarthy

    Eine Zeitreise ins Manhattan der schillernden 30er Jahre: Die Clique – acht bestens ausgebildete junge Frauen, die sich nach Abschluss ihres Studiums am vornehmen VassarCollege hof...

  • Big Bad synopsis, comments

    Big Bad

    Whitney Collins

    Within the thirteen stories of Whitney Collins’s Big Bad dwells a hunger that’s dark, deep, and hilarious. Part domestic horror, part flyover gothic, Big Bad serves up realworld pr...

  • A New Race of Men from Heaven synopsis, comments

    A New Race of Men from Heaven

    Chaitali Sen

    Winner of the 2021 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction “The stories in A New Race of Men from Heaven move elegantly between the ache of loneliness and the grace of connection, ho...

  • The House of the Dead synopsis, comments

    The House of the Dead

    Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    In January 1850 Dostoyevsky was sent to a remote Siberian prison camp for his part in a political conspiracy. The four years he spent there, startlingly recreated in The House of t...

  • Impossible Children synopsis, comments

    Impossible Children

    Robert Yune

    In these inventive short stories, characters must navigate an impossible world: America as we know it. Two estranged brothers on a road trip attempt to reconcile but end up at a Re...

  • The Maverick synopsis, comments

    The Maverick

    Thomas Harding

    The captivating story of the famed publisher George Weidenfeld, from his struggles as an AustrianJewish refugee in London to his rise as a worldrenowned literary figure. After...

  • Entre amigas synopsis, comments

    Entre amigas

    Hannah Arendt & Mary McCarthy

    Cuando se cumplen cien años del nacimiento de Hannah Arendt, reeditamos un documento fundamental para entender no solo la obra y la vida de la gran pensadora alemana sino también l...

  • Vino para Dummies synopsis, comments

    Vino para Dummies

    Ed McCarthy & Mary Ewing-Mulligan

    Si el lenguaje de los enólogos se te hace incomprensible e incluso un poco pretencioso, o la información de las etiquetas de las botellas te deja indiferente, necesitas este libro ...

  • Come Back in September synopsis, comments

    Come Back in September

    Darryl Pinckney

    Critic and writer Darryl Pinckney recalls his friendship and apprenticeship with Elizabeth Hardwick and Barbara Epstein and the introduction they offered him to the New York litera...

  • Upper Bohemia synopsis, comments

    Upper Bohemia

    Hayden Herrera

    A New Yorker Best Book of 2021A “touching, heartbreaking, and exceptional” (Town & Country) comingofage memoir by the daughter of artistic, bohemian parentsset against a backdr...

  • Robert Mccarthy and Mary Jane Mccarthy V. synopsis, comments

    Robert Mccarthy and Mary Jane Mccarthy V.

    Supreme Court of Missouri

    This case is a wrongful death action in which plaintiffs seek to recover damages for the death of their elevenyearold son who was struck and killed by an automobile. At a jury tria...

  • The Customs of the Kingdoms of India synopsis, comments

    The Customs of the Kingdoms of India

    Marco Polo

    As Marco Polo (12541324) returned home across the Indian Ocean, after years in the service of Genghis Khan, he picked up a fabulous array of stories from sailors and merchants, abo...

  • Mary McGrory synopsis, comments

    Mary McGrory

    John Norris

    A wildly entertaining biography of the trailblazing Washington columnist and the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for commentary Before there was Maureen Dowd or Gail Col...

  • Chaplin synopsis, comments

    Chaplin

    Stephen Weissman

    “Chaplin is arguably the single most important artist produced by the cinema,” wrote film critic Andrew Sarris. Born in London in 1889, Charlie Chaplin grew up in dire poverty. Sev...

  • The Taming of the Shrew synopsis, comments

    The Taming of the Shrew

    William Shakespeare & G. R. Hibbard

    'I pity the man who cannot enjoy Shakespeare' George Bernard ShawThe beautiful and witty Katherina has sworn never to accept the demands of any wouldbe husband. But when she is pu...

  • The Secret Agent synopsis, comments

    The Secret Agent

    Joseph Conrad

    With a note by the author.'Madness and despair! Give me that for a lever, and I'll move the world'In the only novel Conrad set in London, The Secret Agent communicates a profoundly...