A short life of the author
Mary Therese McCarthy (1912–1989) was born in Seattle and orphaned at age six when both parents died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. She was raised by various relatives — some loving, some abusive — and the experience of dislocation, reinvention, and merciless self-examination that followed became the material of her greatest memoir, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957). She became the most brilliant and combative literary intellectual of mid-century America: a novelist, critic, essayist, and polemicist whose prose combined surgical precision with a devastating social eye.
Life and Career
McCarthy graduated from Vassar in 1933 — an experience she later satirised in The Group (1963) — and moved to New York, where she became the drama critic of Partisan Review and a central figure in the anti-Stalinist intellectual circle that included Philip Rahv, Dwight Macdonald, and Edmund Wilson. She married Wilson in 1938 (her second of four marriages); the relationship was intellectually stimulating and physically violent.
The Company She Keeps (1942), a linked collection of stories about a witty, self-aware woman navigating New York intellectual life, established her reputation. The Groves of Academe (1952) and A Charmed Life (1955) are campus novels of acid precision.
The Group (1963) — following eight Vassar graduates of the class of 1933 through the Depression and into the war years — was a publishing sensation: it sat atop the bestseller list for two years and sold millions of copies. Its frankness about sex and contraception was scandalous for its time.
McCarthy was also a distinguished travel writer. Venice Observed (1956) and The Stones of Florence (1959) are among the finest books ever written about Italian cities — erudite, opinionated, and gorgeously observed.
Her most famous public moment came in 1980, when she declared on The Dick Cavett Show that every word Lillian Hellman wrote was a lie, “including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” Hellman sued for $2.25 million; the suit was dropped when Hellman died in 1984.
McCarthy died in New York on 25 October 1989.
Major Works and Themes
McCarthy’s fiction is autobiographical, satirical, and intellectually rigorous. Her protagonists — typically intelligent, attractive, self-deceiving women — are subjected to an authorial scrutiny that is as merciless toward herself as toward others. Her prose is among the most precisely observed in American fiction; she notices everything and forgives nothing.
McCarthy, Sontag, and the Female Intellectual
McCarthy and Susan Sontag are the two models of the American woman of letters — brilliant, combative, glamorous, and willing to be disliked. McCarthy preceded Sontag by a generation and in some ways prepared the ground: she demonstrated that a woman could operate at the highest level of intellectual debate, write criticism with authority, and combine beauty with brains without apology. But the comparison also reveals a difference in temperament: Sontag was fundamentally an aesthete who became political; McCarthy was fundamentally a moralist who wrote about aesthetics. McCarthy’s criticism always asks whether something is honest; Sontag’s asks whether it is interesting.
The Hellman feud, though it became McCarthy’s most famous public moment, is less interesting than what it reveals about her critical method. McCarthy’s objection to Hellman was not personal but epistemological: she believed that Hellman’s memoirs (Pentimento, Scoundrel Time) presented fabricated events as truth, and that this constituted a moral offense against the reader. The distinction between fiction and memoir, between what is invented and what is remembered, was for McCarthy a matter of intellectual integrity — the same standard she applied, mercilessly, to her own autobiographical writing in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, where she appends corrective footnotes to her own memories, noting where she may have falsified or embellished.
This scrupulousness — the willingness to turn the analytical knife on herself as ruthlessly as on others — is what distinguishes McCarthy from lesser satirists. Her characters are cruel portraits, but they are self-portraits too: she sees herself in the ambitious, self-deceiving women she creates, and the comedy is as much confession as caricature.
Critical Reception and Legacy
McCarthy was the most prominent female intellectual of her era. Her critical reputation has fluctuated — The Group was dismissed by some as middlebrow — but her best fiction, her memoirs, and her Italian travel books have endured, and her model of the writer as public intellectual remains aspirational for women writers who refuse to choose between beauty and brains.
Key Works
- The Company She Keeps (1942)
- The Groves of Academe (1952)
- Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957)
- The Stones of Florence (1959)
- The Group (1963)
- Birds of America (1971)
- Cannibals and Missionaries (1979)
Collecting McCarthy
The Group (1963, Harcourt, Brace & World) is the most collected title, both as a bestselling phenomenon and as a cultural document. First editions with jacket bring $100–$400.
The Company She Keeps (1942, Simon & Schuster) is scarcer as a wartime debut and brings $200–$800 with jacket.
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957, Harcourt, Brace) is the most critically admired title and steadily appreciating. McCarthy signed copies are moderately available and bring modest premiums.