Mary McCarthy (author)
Mary McCarthy | |
---|---|
Born | Mary Therese McCarthy June 21, 1912 Seattle, Washington, U.S. |
Died | October 25, 1989 New York City, U.S. | (aged 77)
Education | Vassar College A.B. (1933) |
Notable awards | American Academy of Arts and Letters (1960) Edward MacDowell Medal (1984) National Medal for Literature (1984) |
Spouse | Harald Johnsrud (m. 1933) Edmund Wilson (m. 1938) Bowden Broadwater (m. 1946) James West (m. 1961) |
Children | 1 |
Relatives | Kevin McCarthy (brother) |
Mary Therese McCarthy (June 21, 1912 – October 25, 1989) was an American novelist, critic and political activist, best known for her novel
Literary career and public life
McCarthy's
After building a reputation as a
McCarthy's feud with fellow writer
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.[14] As executor, McCarthy prepared Arendt's unfinished manuscript The Life of the Mind for publication.[15] 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.[16]
Ideology
This section needs additional citations for verification. (July 2022) |
McCarthy left the
In New York, she moved in "
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.[19] She documented her observations in two books: Vietnam, and Hanoi.[20]
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.[21] She wrote favorably about the Viet Cong.[22]
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.[23]
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.[24]
Personal life
Born in
When the situation became intolerable, McCarthy was taken in by her maternal grandparents in Seattle. Her maternal grandmother, Augusta Morganstern, was Jewish, and her maternal grandfather, Harold Preston, a prominent attorney and co-founder of the law firm
McCarthy credited her grandfather, who helped draft one of the nation's first
Under the guardianship of the Prestons, McCarthy studied at the
Marriage and family
McCarthy married four times. In 1933 she married Harald Johnsrud, an actor and playwright. She and critic Philip Rahv were lovers. Her best-known spouse was her second husband, writer and critic Edmund Wilson, whom she married in 1938 after leaving Rahv. Wilson and McCarthy had a son, Reuel Wilson.
After they divorced, in 1946 she married
Death
McCarthy died of lung cancer on October 25, 1989, at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City.[1]
Film portrayals
In the 2012 German movie Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy is portrayed by Janet McTeer.
Selected works
- "The Man in The Brooks Brothers Shirt", published in Partisan Review in 1941: [1]
- ISBN 0-15-602786-0
- ISBN 1-58348-392-6
- Cast a Cold Eye (1950), HBJ, 1992 reissue: ISBN 978-0-15-615444-4
- ISBN 0-15-602787-9
- ISBN 0-15-616774-3
- Sights and Spectacles: 1937–1956 (1956), FSG
- Venice Observed (1956), Harvest/HBJ, 1963 edition: ISBN 0-15-693521-X(the 1963 edition lacks the illustrations present in the original book)
- ISBN 0-15-658650-9(autobiography)
- The Stones of Florence (1959), Harvest/HBJ, 2002 reprint of 1963 edition: ISBN 0-15-602763-1(the 1963 edition lacks the illustrations present in the original book)
- On the Contrary (1961), LBS, 1980 reissue: ISBN 0-297-77736-X
- ISBN 0-15-637208-8, adapted as a 1966 movie of the same name.
- Vietnam (1967), Harcourt, Brace & World, ISBN 0-15-193633-1
- Hanoi (1968), Harcourt, Brace & World, ISBN 0-15-138450-9
- The Writing on the Wall (1970), Mariner Books, ISBN 0-15-698390-7
- Birds of America (1971), Harcourt, 1992 reprint: ISBN 0-15-612630-3
- Medina (1972), Harvest/HBJ, ISBN 0-15-158530-X
- The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits (1974), Harvest Books, ISBN 0-15-657302-4
- ISBN 0-15-615386-6
- Ideas and the Novel (1980), Harvest/HBJ, ISBN 0-15-143682-7
- The Hounds of Summer and Other Stories (1981), Avon Books, ISBN 0-38-078196-4
- Occasional Prose (1985), HBJ
- How I Grew (1987), Harvest Books, ISBN 0-15-642185-2(intellectual autobiography age 13–21)
- Intellectual Memoirs (1992), published posthumously (edited and with a foreword by Elizabeth Hardwick)
- A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays (2002), ISBN 1-59017-010-5
Books about McCarthy
- Sam Reese, The Short Story in Midcentury America: Countercultural Form in the Work of Bowles, McCarthy, Welty, and Williams, (2017), Louisiana State University Press, ISBN 9780807165768
- Sabrina Fuchs Abrams, Mary McCarthy: Gender, Politics, And The Postwar Intellectual, (2004), Peter Lang Publishing, ISBN 0-8204-6807-X
- 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
- Doris Grumbach, The Company She Kept, 1967, Coward-McCann, Inc., LoC CCN: 66-26531,
- Alan Ackerman, Just Words, (2011), Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-300-16712-2
- Michelle Dean, Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion, (2018), Grove Press, ISBN 978-0802125095
- Frances Kiernan, Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy, (2000), W. W. Norton & Company, ISBN 0-393-03801-7
References
- ^ New York Hospital. She was 77 years old and lived in Castine, Maine, and Paris.
- ^ The Montgomery Fellows Program. "Mary McCarthy." Dartmouth College, 2017. Retrieved October 11, 2017.
- ^ "Mary McCarthy". John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
- ^ "Academy Members". American Academy of Arts and Letters.
- ^ "Fellows – Affiliated Fellows – Residents 1970–1989". American Academy in Rome. Archived from the original on January 18, 2017. Retrieved January 16, 2017.
- ^ "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter M" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved July 25, 2014.
- ^ "Mary McCarthy Wins Medal for Literature". The New York Times. April 10, 1984.
- ^ Freedman, Samuel G. (August 27, 1984). "MCCARTHY IS RECIPIENT OF MACDOWELL MEDAL". The New York Times.
- ^ Mary McCarthy: A Biographical Sketch at Vassar College Library
- ^ Kiernan, Frances. "Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, and the Short Story That Ruined a Marriage". New Yorker.
- ^ "Ben Pleasants's Contentious Minds: The Mary McCarthy / Lillian Hellman Affair". Hollywoodinvestigator.com. Retrieved November 9, 2010.
- ^ Saidi, Janet (September 20, 2002). "When Mary Met Lillian". The Christian Science Monitor.
- ^ Jacobson, Phyllis (Summer 1997). "Two Invented Lives". New Politics. Retrieved November 9, 2010.
- OCLC 51289864.
- ISBN 0-15-651992-5.
- ^ "Mary McCarthy: A Biographical Sketch". Special Collections: Mary McCarthy – A Biographical Sketch. Vassar College Libraries. Archived from the original on August 23, 2014. Retrieved June 26, 2014.
- ^ McCarthy, Mary (October 2, 1988). "Letter to the editor: Flannery O'Connor's works". The New York Times. Archived from the original on May 25, 2015. Retrieved May 18, 2016.
- OCLC 1142845156.
- ^ "2 Novelists Tell of Visit to Hanoi; Mary McCarthy Found Foe Confident of Winning". The New York Times. Retrieved February 25, 2023.
- ^ Mary McCarthy, Vietnam (1967); Mary McCarthy, Hanoii (1968).
- ^ Leckie, Robert (1992). The Wars of America. Castle Books.
- ^ Liukkonen, Petri. "Mary McCarthy". Books and Writers (kirjasto.sci.fi). Finland: Kuusankoski Public Library. Archived from the original on December 9, 2004.
- ^ Mary McCarthy, Hanoii (1968).
- ^ McCarthy, Mary (March 7, 1974). "On Colonel Risner". The New York Review of Books. 21 (3). Retrieved July 26, 2014.
- ISBN 0-393-32307-2.
- ^ "James R. West, 84, Diplomat Married to Mary McCarthy". The New York Times. September 17, 1999. Retrieved May 12, 2010.
Further reading
- Wilson, Reuel (2018). Holding the road : away from Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy. Charleston, South Carolina. OCLC 1091357698.)
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External links
- Mary McCarthy at IMDb
- Mary McCarthy at the Internet Broadway Database
- Elisabeth Sifton (Winter–Spring 1962). "Mary McCarthy, The Art of Fiction No. 27". The Paris Review. Winter-Spring 1962 (27).
- New York Times Featured Author Page (Book Reviews, Interviews, Sound Clips.)
- Literary Encyclopedia (in-progress)
- Petri Liukkonen. "Mary McCarthy". Books and Writers.
- Brief bio at Vassar College
- Map of Mary's NYC, 1936–1938 based on Intellectual Memoirs
- Mary McCarthy at Find a Grave