Mary mccarthy writer biography

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The McCarthy children were raised by what she characterizes as her austere and harsh guardians, their great-Aunt Margaret Sheridan  and her husband, Myers Shriver, in a modest home in Minneapolis.

McCarthy chronicles these early years of denial and deprivation in her autobiography, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, and describes being “saved” by her maternal grandparents, the prominent Seattle lawyer Harold Preston and her genteel Jewish grandmother, Augusta Morganstern Preston, who brought Mary to their home in Seattle, Washington while her younger brothers went off to boarding school.



This literary critic authored more than two dozen books, including the now-classic nPeople note American writer Mary Therese McCarthy for her sharp literary criticism and satirical fiction, including the novels The Groves of Academe (1952) and The Group (1963).

McCarthy studied at Vassar college in Poughkeepsie, New York and graduated in 1933.

. Mary McCarthy gained significant recognition with the release of her book "The Group" in 1962.  

From her early autobiographical writing, including Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957) and the collection of autobiographical sketches The Company She Keeps (1942), to her political satire of anarcho-pacifist movements of the 1940s in The Oasis (1949) and of fellow-traveling liberal intellectuals in the 1950s in The Groves of Academe (1952),to her best-selling mock- chronicle novel of a group of Vassar graduates of the class of 1933, The Group (1963), and her later political commentary on the war in Vietnam and the Watergate trials, Mary McCarthy looks at the changing political, cultural, and social scene with a critical eye.

McCarthy is perhaps best known for her open treatment of what were considered taboo subjects of sexuality, from contraception to abortion to infidelity and sexual promiscuity, presenting both the comic overtones and the complex psychological and moral undertones to issues of female sexuality.  McCarthy’s caustic wit has earned her the reputation among certain male critics of being a “modern American bitch” with a “devastating female scorn” while some feminists have criticized her for not creating stronger female characters and not taking a stronger stand on women’s issues.

McCarthy’s life has been the subject of numerous biographies, including Doris Grumbach’s The Company She Kept (1967), Carol Gelderman’s Mary McCarthy: A Life (1988), Carol Brightman’s Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World (1992), and Frances Kiernan’s Seeing Mary Plain (2000). Her writing has been the subject of several critical studies, including Barbara McKenzie’s Mary McCarthy (1965) and Sabrina Fuchs Abrams’ Mary McCarthy: Gender, Politics and the Postwar Intellectual (2004). 

Mary Therese McCarthy was born on June 21, 1912, in Seattle, Washington to Roy McCarthy and Therese (Tess) Preston McCarthy.  She was of mixed religious origins from her Irish Catholic father and her half-Jewish/half-Protestant mother, which in part shaped the marginalized identity she depicts in her autobiography,  Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957).

 She took a one year teaching position at Bard College, and met Bowden Broadwater, a staff member at the New Yorker and eight years her junior, whom she married in 1946 and remained with for fifteen years.

She spent summers in Truro near Wellfleet at the home of Italian anarcho-pacifist and anti-fascist Nicola Chiaromonte among other leftist intellectuals.

Interestingly, the despotic and unattractive nature of her Catholic upbringing turned Mary into a convinced atheist.

After graduating from a Catholic school, Mary enrolled in Vassar College, which she completed in 1933.  With the advent of the atomic bomb and the emerging totalitarian threat of Soviet Russia, some New York intellectuals turned toward anarcho-pacifism as an ideological ideal.  Under Chiaromonte’s influence she helped form Europe-America Groups in 1948, a non-partisan organization for international aid to European intellectuals after World War II.

 The organization dissolved a year later due to factionalism.  The factionalism of leftist intellectuals and the failure of intellectuals to put their ideas into action are parodied in McCarthy’s satire, The Oasis (1949). This challenging experience later became the basis for her autobiography, "Memories of a Catholic Girlhood" (1957).

The book achieved some scandalous success, as its frank portrayal of the social environment displeased many of its representatives.  Having abandoned the possibility of forming small, libertarian communities with the failure of Europe-American Groups in the forties, she retained the ideal of “libertarian socialism” or “decentralized socialism”, though she conceded little possibility of actually attaining such an ideal.

McCarthy wrote a series of articles for The New York Review of Books between 1967 and 1972 based on her reporting in Saigon and Hanoi which were printed as pamphlets, Vietnam  and Hanoi to raise public awareness and opposition to the war.  McCarthy’s writing on Vietnam is an indictment of what she sees as the corrupting influence of American capitalist culture on a rural, agrarian folk culture.

In 1942, McCarthy published her first book, "The Company She Keeps." The novel's protagonist is a young intellectual woman dissatisfied with her life and the so-called New York bohemian scene. In 1980, she published "Ideas and the Novel," followed by "How I Grew" in 1987 after a significant hiatus.

Personal Life and Legacy

It is known that Mary McCarthy divorced her second husband, Edmund Wilson, and remarried in 1948 to Bowden Broadwater.

These articles eventually became her book "Theatre Chronicles, 1937-1962" (1963).

Early Literary Career and Marriage

In 1933, Mary McCarthy got married, but her marriage to actor and playwright Harald Johnsrud ended soon.

This literary critic authored more than two dozen books, including the now-classic novel The Group, the New York Times bestseller in 1963.

mary mccarthy writer biography

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IDEAS AND THE NOVEL

McCarthy reflects on why writers of contemporary fiction set aside ideas, concepts, and public issues, in contrast with their 19th century counterparts.

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A BOLT FROM THE BLUE

This selection of essays, which spans McCarthy’s career from the late 1930s to the late 1970s, includes her writings on topics such as fashion magazines, Eugene O’Neill, A Streetcar Named Desire, Look Back in Anger, Pale Fire, J.D.

Salinger, Madame Bovary, Italo Calvino, and Watergate.

THE COLLECTED ESSAYS

A collection of three volumes, The Writing in the Wall, Occasional Prose, and Ideas and the Novel, that encompasses literary criticism, politics, friendship, and more.

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Mary McCarthy

American writer, critic, political activist
Date of Birth: 21.06.1912
Country: USA

Content:
  1. Mary McCarthy - American Writer, Critic, and Political Activist
  2. Early Literary Career and Marriage
  3. Political Activism and Later Works
  4. Personal Life and Legacy

Mary McCarthy - American Writer, Critic, and Political Activist

Mary Therese McCarthy was born in 1912 in Seattle, Washington to Roy Winfield McCarthy and Therese Preston.

In her later autobiography, How I Grew (1987) McCarthy describes the intellectual awakening she experienced in Seattle, which began by reading works by Dickens, Tolstoy and Dumas among others in her grandfather’s library and through the public library.

McCarthy enrolled in the Sacred Heart Convent, where she describes having a crisis of faith in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, then briefly attended Garfield public school where she was introduced to a more bohemian outlook and democratizing influence, and was finally schooled at the Annie Wright Seminary, where she was mentored by a Vassar graduate, Dorothy Atkinson, who encouraged her to go East to Vassar for college.

Mary McCarthy attended Vassar College from 1929-1933, where she was initiated into a more elite, East-coast intellectual and social scene, which became the subject of her best-selling novel, The Group (1963).

 In 1952, McCarthy, along with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Hannah Arendt, Dwight Macdonald, and Richard Rovere attempted to form Critic , an independent liberal magazine devoted to politics and civil libertarian issues.  While the project never came to fruition, it foreshadowed McCarthy’s increasing interest in radical politics and social action which peaked in her outspoken opposition to the war in Vietnam in the sixties and seventies.

During the fifties McCarthy also published a collection of short stories, Cast a Cold Eye (1950), including the autobiographical story “The Weeds” based on her destructive relationship with Wilson as well as the novel,  A Charmed Life (1955), a more extensive indictment of her involvement with Wilson.

This literary feud was the subject of a play by Nora Ephron, Imaginary Friends.

Mary McCarthy’s contribution was acknowledged in later life; she received the National Medal for Literature and the MacDowell Medal in 1984 and was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1989.  She died on October 25, 1989 of lung cancer at New York Presbyterian Hospital at the age of seventy-seven. McCarthy continues to be remembered as a shrewd chronicler of twentieth-century American intellectual, social, and political life.