Mary McCarthy A Life

New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988. BOOK: Corners, Spine, Boards Bumped; Light Shelf Rub to Boards; Edges Lightly Soiled. DUST JACKET: Previous Owner Markings (Price Clipped); Lightly Creased; Lightly Chipped; Moderate Yellowing Due to Age; In Archival Quality Jacket Cover. DESIGNED BY: Jaya Dayal. JACKET PHOTO BY: Jerry Bauer. JACKET BY: Paul Gamerello. CONTENTS: Acknowledgments; Preface; Prologue. PART ONE I Forebears (1821-1912) II Parents (1912-1918) III Orphans (1918-1923) IV Caesar and Catiline (1923-1929). PART TWO V Vassar (1929-1933) VI Harold Johnsrud (1933-1936). PART THREE VII The P. R. Boys (1936-1937) VIII Edmund Wilson (1937-1939) IX Wellfleet (1940-1945). PART FOUR X A Dividing Line (1945) XI Academe (1946-1946) XII Realists and Idealists (1947-1949). PART FIVE XIII Portsmouth (1949-1952) XIV Wellfleet Revisited (1952-1955) XV Venice Observed (1955-1956) XVI Florence and a Villa (1956-1959). PART SIX XVII Coup de Foudre (1960-1962) XVIII Bestseller (1963) XIX Stepmother (1963-1966) XX Vietnam (1966-1973) XXI Domestic Virtues (1970-1972) XXII Lives of the Mind (1972-1979) XXIII "Including 'And' and 'The'" (1980-1984) XXIV Looking Backward (The 1980s); Notes; Index. SYNOPSIS: For over half a century, Mary McCarthy has been at the center of the intellectual life of America--and often at the center of controversy. Both through her writing (she has published twenty-four books and countless essays and reviews) and through her personal involvement--from speaking out against Stalinism in the thirties and forties to opposing the Vietnam War in the sixties and seventies--she has helped to shape American thought and culture. Fresh out of Vassar in the early 1930s, McCarthy set the literary world on its ear with her first series of articles, "Our Critics, Right or Wrong," attacking the mediocrity of America's book reviewers. She went on to become one of New York's leading intellectual figures--a critic respected and feared for her ruthless wit, and a founding editor of Partisan Review, the most influential literary magazine of its time. Then with novels such as The Company She Keeps (1942) and the bestsellers The Group (1963) and Birds of America (1971), she established herself as a unique voice in American fiction. Her Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957) is acknowledged as a classic of autobiography. This book, however, is the first complete and objective account of Mary McCarthy's remarkable life. Orphaned at the age of six, McCarthy had an almost Dickensian childhood. She was put into the care of an authoritarian aunt and uncle who treated her with a harshness she never forgot, then rescued by her maternal grandparents and sent to private schools and Vassar. Carol Gelderman shows how the intertwining streaks of wild rebelliousness and scrupulous (even brutal) honesty that marked McCarthy's youth have made her adult life equally eventful. Gelderman tells of McCarthy's four marriages, including her stormy, short-lived union with Edmund Wilson; of her battles with Stalinist intellectuals over the Moscow Trials--the experience, McCarthy said, that "changed her life" by awakening her politically; of her years of protest against American policy in Vietnam, and her visits to North and South Vietnam during the conflict; and of her most recent front-page battle, when Lillian Hellman sued her for libel. Throughout this account, however, Carol Gelderman has kept the focus on Mary McCarthy herself, rather than on the headlines and intellectual skirmishes, and she shows us the gentle side of McCarthy's personality as well as the combative one. In particular, this biography reveals the importance to McCarthy of three crucial friendships in her life, with the writers Nicola Chiaromonte and Hannah Arendt, and with James West, her fourth husband and the first real love of her life. The warmth of these relationships, Gelderman suggests, belies the popular image--which her own sharp tongue has helped to bring on herself--of McCarthy as a "cutting," "heartless" literary pugilist. In these pages, Carol Gelderman tells Mary McCarthy's story with a rare mixture of scholarship and sensitivity. She has drawn on exhaustive research into McCarthy's personal papers and her complete correspondence, and on interviews with McCarthy and dozens of her contemporaries. The result is a vivid and intimate portrait of an uncommon writer, who has led an uncommon life. Carol Gelderman was born in Detroit and, like Mary McCarthy, educated for a time by the Mesdames of the Sacred Heart. She is a member of the English Department of the University of New Orleans. Her previous biography, Henry Ford: The Wayward Capitalist, was acclaimed as "engrossing" (Publishers Weekly), "enlightening" (Business Week), and "thoroughly researched...psychologically convincing" (The New Yorker).. First Edition 1st Printing. Hard Cover. Fine/Very Good. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.