Mary McCarthy (1912 - 1989) was an American author and critic. She was politically active on the Left for many years.

She grew up in Seattle and graduated from Vassar College in 1933. She moved in Communist circles early in her life, but later repudiated Communism and wrote vigorously against writers she considered to be sympathetic to Stalinism.

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

Her feud with fellow writer Lillian Hellman went on in public for years, and formed the basis for the play Imaginary Friends by Nora Ephron.

Selected works

• The Company She Keeps (1942)
• Ths Oasis (1949)
• Ths Groves of Academe (1952)
• Venic Observed (1956)
• Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood (1957)
• The Stones of Florence (1959)
• The Group (1962)
• Vietnam (1967)
• Birds of America (1971)
• The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits (1974)
• Cannibals and Missionaries (1979)
• Ideas and the Novel (1980)

External link

Mary (Therese) McCarthy, from the Books and Writers Calendar site