Most Popular Books by Mary Mccarthy

The author and her three brothers, left orphans at an early age, were raised together by guardians.

The electrifying portrait of an idealistic young man who is an unwilling witness to the changes in society and its values. Here is a book that captures the very essence of the 1960s and is at the same time as fresh today as when it was first published in 1965.

A college instructor embarks on a fanatical quest to save his job—and enact righteous revenge—in this brilliantly acerbic satire of university politics during the early Cold War years Henry Mulcahy''s future is in question. An instructor of literature at Jocelyn College, an institute of higher learning renowned for its progressive approach to education, he has just received word that he will not be teaching next semester. He strongly suspects that his dismissal has been engineered by his nemesis, the college president, who Henry believes resents his superior skills as an educator. Or perhaps he is being targeted by the government in this Cold War era, now that Senator Joseph McCarthy''s communist witch hunt is in full swing, especially since Henry''s dedication to independent thinking is, he believes, renowned. Whatever the case, Henry Mulcahy wants justice—and vengeance—and he will not go quietly without a fight. But the battle might expose too much of Henry''s true nature . . . Witty and biting, Mary McCarthy''s The Groves of Academe is a deliciously pointed satire of the world of higher education and its petty despots, tiny wars, and internal politics. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author''s estate.

"Mary McCarthy may be best remembered today for her novels and memoirs, but she was also a dazzling and prolific essayist and critic, known for her witty and fearless commentary on topics ranging from American realist playwrights to women''s fashion magazines, from left-wing politics to the nineteenth-century novel." "This collection, which spans her career from the 1930s to the 1970s, displays McCarthy''s acute judgment and stylistic brio. It begins with a generous selection of her drama reviews, and includes essays on Nabokov, Burroughs, Salinger, Flaubert, Calvino, Sarraute, and Tolstoy. In the essays that follow, she dissects the social and political controversies that dominated midcentury American intellectual life, from the Moscow trials to the Vietnam War and the Watergate hearings."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Three brilliant novels from a #1 New York Times–bestselling author. Navigating friendship, sex, careers, and the challenges of adulthood, the characters of Mary McCarthy''s novels remain instantly relatable, whether they''re living in 1930s New York City or 1960s Paris. Here, three of her most outstanding works are collected in one volume. The Group: This "witty . . . brilliant" blockbuster bestseller follows eight privileged girls from their youthful friendship at Vassar through their complicated journeys into womanhood ( Cosmopolitan). The Company She Keeps: A "clever, witty, polished" novel about a young bohemian''s daring political and romantic explorations among an intellectual Manhattan social circle ( The New York Times). Birds of America: In 1964, a shy young student and birdwatcher arrives in Paris to study at the Sorbonne and finds himself disoriented by the rapidly changing world around him. This "endlessly fascinating novel" ( San Francisco Chronicle) is "in the same class as Henry James''s The American and Henry Miller''s Tropic of Cancer" ( Esquire). Known for her satirical wit and blending of autobiographical detail from her own colorful life into her fiction, McCarthy was a literary icon whose books provide a rich glimpse of mid-twentieth-century America and a psychologically astute, timeless reading experience.

In this eye-opening book, Mary McCarthy shares her love of the novel and her fear that it is becoming an endangered literary species "He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it." So begins Mary McCarthy''s fascinating critical analysis of the novel (and its practitioners) from her double-edged perspective as both reader and writer. The bestselling author of The Group takes T. S. Eliot''s quote about Henry James, written in 1918, as a jumping-off point to discuss how the novel has evolved—or not—in the last century. In this lively, erudite book, McCarthy throws down the gauntlet: Why did the nineteenth century produce novels of ideas while the twentieth century is so lacking in serious fiction? She winnows out the underachieving (read: overhyped) authors from the geniuses, explores why Jean Valjean personifies man''s conscience in Victor Hugo''s Les Misérables, and shows how Stendhal''s The Red and the Black "illustrates the evil effects of reading." She also tackles the role of the omniscient narrator and analogizes novels to air travel. With its exploration of authors from Balzac to D. H. Lawrence, Ideas and the Novel holds inviolate the idea of the novel as a means ultimately of liberating ideas. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author''s estate.

This smash bestseller about privileged Vassar classmates shocked America in the sixties and remains “juicy . . . witty . . . brilliant” (Cosmopolitan). At Vassar, they were known as “the group”—eight young women of privilege, the closest of friends, an eclectic mix of vibrant personalities. A week after graduation in 1933, they all gather for the wedding of Kay Strong, one of their own, before going their separate ways in the world. In the years that follow, they will each know accomplishment and loss in equal measure, pursuing careers and marriage, experiencing the joys and traumas of sexual awakening and motherhood, all while suffering through betrayals, infidelities, and sometimes madness. Some of them will drift apart. Some will play important roles in the personal dramas of others. But it is tragedy that will ultimately unite the group once again. A novel that stunned the world when it was first published in 1963, Mary McCarthy’s The Group found acclaim, controversy, and a place atop the New York Times bestseller list for nearly two years for its frank and controversial exploration of women’s issues, social concerns, and sexuality. A blistering satire of the mores of an emergent generation of women, The Group is McCarthy’s enduring masterpiece, still as relevant, powerful, and wonderfully entertaining fifty years on. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author’s estate.

A vicious and brilliant satire of human vanity from the author of the classic bestseller The Group Long out of print, Mary McCarthy''s second novel is a bitingly funny satire set in the early years of the Cold War about a group of writers, editors, and intellectuals who retreat to rural New England to found a hilltop utopia. With this group loosely divided into two factions—purists, led by the libertarian editor Macdougal Macdermott, and the realists, skeptics led by the smug Will Taub—the situation is ripe not only for disaster but for comedy, as reality clashes with their dreams of a perfect society. Though written as a roman à clef, McCarthy barely disguised her characters, including using her former lover Philip Rahv, founder of Partisan Review, as the model for Will Taub. As a result, the novel caused an absolute explosion of outrage among the literary elite of the day, who clearly recognized themselves among her all-too-accurate portraits. Rahv threatened a lawsuit to stop publication. Diana Trilling, Lionel Trilling''s wife, called McCarthy a "thug." McCarthy''s friend Dwight McDonald (Macdougal Macdermott) called it "vicious, malicious, and nasty." Never one to shy away from controversy, McCarthy''s portrait of her generation had indeed drawn blood. But the brilliance of the novel has outlasted its first detonation and can now be enjoyed for its aphoritic, fearless dissection of the vanities of human endeavor. In an added bonus, the renowned essayist Vivian Gornick details in a moving introduction the importance of McCarthy''s intellectual and artistic bravery, and how she influenced a generation of young writers and thinkers.

The celebrated author of The Group offers a "clever, witty, polished" portrait of the 1940s NYC literary bohemia she knew so well in this debut novel ( The New York Times). Margaret Sargent is young and fearless, a deep thinker inspired by the bohemian energy that abounds in New York City in the years leading up to the Second World War. With careless abandon, she destroys her marriage and numerous love affairs as she moves through the social circles of artists and writers, playing at the fringes of political extremism. She is an enigma, often wanton and frivolous, but possessing intelligence and a razor-sharp wit, as well as a troubling core of inner darkness, self-doubt, and puzzling tendencies toward self-destruction. For Margaret, urban life in the 1930s is an ongoing adventure—ever-changing, always surprising, and deeply, profoundly unsatisfying. Mary McCarthy, author of the bestselling American classic The Group, burst boldly onto the literary scene with her provocative debut, The Company She Keeps. A brilliant, stylistically inventive novel, it offers a rich portrait of a truly fascinating protagonist in six revealing episodes. Love her, despise her, or fear for her, you will never forget Margaret Sargent. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author''s estate.

The author of The Group, the groundbreaking bestseller and 1964 National Book Award finalist that shaped a generation of women, brings reminiscences of her girlhood to this intimate and illuminating memoir How I Grew is Mary McCarthy''s intensely personal autobiography of her life from age thirteen to twenty-one. Orphaned at six, McCarthy was raised by her maternal grandparents in Seattle, Washington. Although her official birthdate is in 1912, it wasn''t until she turned thirteen that, in McCarthy''s own words, she was "born as a mind." With detail driven by an almost astonishing memory recall, McCarthy gives us a masterful account of these formative years. From her wild adolescence—including losing her virginity at fourteen—through her eventual escape to Vassar, the bestselling novelist, essayist, and critic chronicles her relationships with family, friends, lovers, and the teachers who would influence her writing career. Filled with McCarthy''s penetrating insights and trenchant wit, this is an unblinkingly honest and fearless self-portrait of a young woman coming of age—and the perfect companion to McCarthy''s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author''s estate.

In this no-holds-barred memoir with a foreword by Elizabeth Hardwick, the bestselling author of The Group recalls her early life in New York, revealing the genesis of and genius behind her groundbreaking fiction Mary McCarthy is a married twenty-four-year-old Communist and critic when this memoir begins. She''s disciplined, dedicated, and sexually experimental: At one point she realizes that in twenty-four hours she "had slept with three different men." But she believes in the institution of marriage. Over the course of three years, she will have had two husbands, the second being the esteemed, much older critic Edmund Wilson. It is Wilson who becomes McCarthy''s mentor and muse, urging her to try her hand at fiction. McCarthy''s powers of observation are on witty display here, as the seventy-something writer recalls events that took place half a century earlier. Her eye for the revealing detail will be recognized by readers of her novels as she describes marching in May Day parades, attending parties for the Scottsboro Boys, and witnessing firsthand the American left wing''s response to the Moscow trials and the Spanish Civil War. Picking up where How I Grew left off and unfinished at the time of her death in 1989, Intellectual Memoirs is a vivid snapshot of a distinctive place and time—New York in the late 1930s—and the forces that shaped Mary McCarthy''s life as a woman and a writer. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author''s estate.

Mary McCarthy, one of our most brilliant and beloved authors, serves up wit, insight, and her unique worldview in this diverse collection of essays In provocatively titled pieces such as "The Contagion of Ideas," "Tyranny of the Orgasm," and "No News, or,What Killed the Dog," Mary McCarthy expresses her frank, unflinching, often contrarian point of view. Nothing—and no one—is safe from her merciless writer''s eye—from politics to the ever-changing social scene to the strengths and weaknesses of her native country, where she believes "passivity and not aggressiveness is the dominant trait of the American character." On the Contrary also features a cast of memorable characters. In "Naming Names," Arthur Miller''s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee results in an indictment for contempt of Congress. McCarthy reviews The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt''s breakthrough book, and despairs of finding a "really American place" to take a visiting existentialist—a thinly disguised Simone de Beauvoir? From Dickens to Gandhi to the Kinsey Reports, with pithy and wide-ranging articles on everything from fashion to fiction, the human condition, religion, and sex, On the Contrary raises controversial questions to which, even today, there are no easy answers. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author''s estate.

DIVDIVFrom Madame Bovary to Macbeth, this collection by Mary McCarthy offers surprising revelations about some of the world’s most beloved works/divDIV Shakespeare, Nabokov, Orwell, and Burroughs are just a few of the literary immortals featured in this engaging and thought-provoking volume./divDIV In one remarkable essay, McCarthy provides a lively discourse on the true nature of evil in Shakespeare’s plays. Focusing on the character of Macbeth, she reveals why Lady Macbeth, who has to “unsex herself” and “wear the pants,” is the more human of the two. She tells us why the often-overlooked character of Madame Bovary’s husband, Charles, is the true hero, and not Emma Bovary, whom Flaubert once famously said was himself. Also included here is McCarthy’s impassioned defense of Hannah Arendt’s controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem, as well as a discussion of the reactionary leftist writers, and a look at why J. D. Salinger was the obvious successor to Hemingway./divDIV Distinguished by McCarthy’s savage intelligence, clarity of thought, and utter lack of pretension, The Writing on the Wall is a timeless gem from an author who reveres the written word./divDIV This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author’s estate./div/div