McCarthy, Mary

McCarthy, Mary (Therese)

(born June 21, 1912, Seattle, Wash., U.S.—died Oct. 25, 1989, New York, N.Y.) U.S. novelist and critic. She served on the editorial staff of the Partisan Review from 1937 to 1948. She began writing fiction at the urging of her second husband, Edmund Wilson. Her work is noted for bitingly satiric commentaries on marriage, the impotence of intellectuals, and the role of women in contemporary urban America. Her novels include The Company She Keeps (1942); The Group (1963), her most popular work; Birds of America (1971); and Cannibals and Missionaries (1979). She also wrote two autobiographies, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957) and How I Grew (1987).

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McCarthy, Mary (Therese) (1912–89) woman of letters; born in Seattle, Wash. A Vassar graduate, she began her career as a reviewer for the Nation, New Republic, and Partisan Review, and in the course of a career embracing journalism, fiction, and autobiography, she became America's preeminent woman of letters. McCarthy chronicled decades of American intellectual life in satirical fiction, engaged other writers in public feuds, and repeatedly took contentious literary and political stands in print. The second of her four husbands was Edmund Wilson (married 1938–46).