Women's Health Women

Mary McCarthy Wikipedia

Image:Marymccarthy.jpg|frame|Mary McCarthy

Mary Therese McCarthy (June 21 1912 - October 25 1989) was an United States|American author and critic. She was politically active in left-wing politics for many years.

Born in Seattle, Washington, McCarthy was orphaned at the age of six, both her parents dying in the Spanish flu|great flu epidemic of 1918. She was raised in very unhappy circumstances by her two sets of Catholic grandparents, which would lead her to ultimately leave the Church. Her actor brother, Kevin McCarthy (actor)|Kevin McCarthy went on to star in such movies as Death of a Salesman (1951) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

She grew up in Seattle and graduated from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1933. She left the Church as a young woman. She moved in radical circles early in the thirties, but by the latter half of the decade she had repudiated Soviet-style Communism in favor of Trotskyism, and wrote vigorously against writers she considered to be sympathetic to Stalinism. During the 1940s and 1950s she became a liberal critic of both McCarthyism and Communism. She remained a liberal to the end of her life, arguing against the Vietnam War in the sixties.

She married several times. Her best-known spouse was the critic Edmund Wilson, whom she married in 1938. She also maintained a close friendship, and a sizable correspondence, with Hannah Arendt.

McCarthy enjoyed some popular success when her 1963 novel The Group remained on The New York Times best-seller list for almost two years.

Her feud with fellow writer Lillian Hellman went on in public for decades, and formed the basis for the play Imaginary Friends by Nora Ephron. McCarthy famously said on The Dick Cavett Show that "every word (Hellman) writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'." Hellman responded by filing a $2.5 million libel suit against McCarthy but died before it reached a conclusion. http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/k/kiernan-mary.html

It was assumed that the lawsuit would end with Hellman's death, but it did not--ending only with McCarthy's death in 1989, 5 years after Hellman died.

McCarthy died on October 25, 1989 of cancer in New York City at the age of 77.

Last Modified:   2005-12-19