Ideas and the Novel (12 page)

A Biography of Mary McCarthy

Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) was an American critic, public intellectual, and author of more than two dozen books, including the 1963
New York Times
bestseller
The Group
.

McCarthy was born on June 21, 1912, in Seattle, Washington, to Roy Winfield McCarthy and Therese (“Tess”) Preston McCarthy. McCarthy and her three younger brothers, Kevin, Preston, and Sheridan, were suddenly orphaned in 1918. While the family was en route from Seattle to a new home in Minneapolis, both parents died of influenza within a day of one another.

After being shuttled between relatives, the children were finally sent to live with a great-aunt, Margaret Sheridan McCarthy, and her husband, Myers Shriver. The Shrivers proved to be cruel and often sadistic adoptive parents. Six years later, Harold Preston, the children’s maternal grandfather and an attorney, intervened. The children were split up, and Mary went to live with her grandparents in their affluent Seattle home. McCarthy reflects on her turbulent youth, Catholic upbringing, and subsequent loss of faith in
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
(1957) and
How I Grew
(1987).

A week after graduating from Vassar in 1933, McCarthy moved to New York City and married Harold Johnsrud, an aspiring playwright. They divorced three years later, but many aspects of their relationship would resurface in the unhappy marriage of Kay Strong and Harald Petersen in
The Group
. In the late 1930s, McCarthy became a member of the
Partisan Review
circle and worked actively as a theater and book critic, contributing to a wide range of publications, such as the
Nation
, the
New Republic
,
Harper’s Magazine
, and the
New York Review of Books
.

In 1938, McCarthy married Edmund Wilson, an established writer; together, they had a son named Reuel, born the same year. Wilson encouraged McCarthy to write fiction, and her first book, a novel entitled
The Company She Keeps
(1942), satirizes the mores of bohemian New York intellectuals from the point of view of an acerbic female protagonist. Her second book,
The Oasis
, a thinly disguised roman à clef about the
Partisan Review
intellectuals, won the English monthly magazine
Horizon
’s fiction contest in 1949.

Soon after her divorce from Wilson in 1945, McCarthy married Bowden Broadwater, a staff member of the
New Yorker
, and also taught literature at Bard College and Sarah Lawrence College.
A Charmed Life
(1955), a novel about the rollercoaster experience of a shaky marriage in a quirky artists’ community, is based on her life with Wilson in Wellfleet, Cape Cod.
The Groves of Academe
(1951), a campus satire informed by her teaching positions, casts an ironic gaze on the foibles of academics. Randall Jarrell’s novel
Pictures from an Institution
(1954) is said to be about McCarthy’s time at Sarah Lawrence, where he also taught.

In the 1950s, McCarthy took a strong interest in European history. Her two books about Italy,
Venice Observed
(1956) and
The Stones of Florence
(1959), combine art criticism, political theory, and reportage to bring the two cities’ histories to life. While on a lecture tour in Poland for the United States Information Agency in 1959 and 1960, McCarthy met the public affairs officer for the US Embassy in Warsaw, James West. McCarthy and West left their respective partners and were married in 1961.

McCarthy’s most popular literary success came in 1963 with the publication of her novel
The Group,
which remained on the
New York Times
bestseller list for almost two years, and was made into a movie by Sidney Lumet in 1966.

McCarthy remained an outspoken critic of politics in the decades that followed. Openly opposing the Vietnam War in the 1960s, she traveled to South Vietnam and wrote a series of articles for the
New York Review of Books
that were subsequently published as
Vietnam
(1967). Her coverage of the Watergate hearings in the 1970s is the basis for
The Mask of State
(1975). Her famous libel feud with writer Lillian Hellman, stemming from McCarthy’s appearance on the
Dick Cavett Show
in 1979, formed the basis for the play
Imaginary Friends
(2002) by Nora Ephron.

McCarthy won a number of literary awards, including the
Horizon
magazine prize (1949) and two Guggenheim Fellowships (1949–1950 and 1959–1960). She also received both the Edward MacDowell Medal and the National Medal for Literature in 1984. She was a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy in Rome. She received honorary degrees from numerous universities including Bard College, Smith College, and Syracuse University.

McCarthy passed away on October 25, 1989. The second volume of her autobiography was published posthumously in 1992 as
Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936–1938
.

A portrait of McCarthy, taken in 1959.

McCarthy with her brother Kevin, circa 1985.

McCarthy with her young son, Reuel Wilson, in 1940.

McCarthy at the wedding of her son, Reuel, in 1981.

McCarthy, circa 1929, on the cover of her autobiography
How I Grew
.

A flyer for a conference held in 1983 on McCarthy’s work.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

Copyright © 1980 by Mary McCarthy

Cover design by Tracy Dunham

978-1-4804-4121-7

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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New York, NY 10014

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