February Hill (Lincoln), 28
Ferguson, Otis (“Oat”), 8, 9–10
Flaubert, Gustave, 90, 125
“Flaubert’s Politics” (Wilson), 125
Formalism, 84–85, 123–24
Fortune, 15, 18, 19, 66, 119
Freud, Sigmund, 26
From the Tsar to Lenin, 87
Fugitives, 24
Gallup, George, 21
Gay Street apartment, 41, 47–49, 55, 59, 62, 67
McCarthy’s sexual affairs at, 61–63
Gellhorn, Martha, 73, 121
“Genial Host, The” (McCarthy), 60
George, Mrs. Robert Latham, 4
Gide, André, 75, 90
Gilfillan, Lauren, 8–10
Gourmont, Rémy de, 36
GPU (Stalin’s agents), 113–14, 121, 126
Graves, Robert, 28
Greene, Robert, 56, 120
Greenwich Village, 8, 41, 44, 65, 92
Group, The (McCarthy), 16–17, 66, 116, 117, 118, 119
Group Theatre, 5, 116
Groves of Academe, The (McCarthy), 99
Guterman, Norbert, 77
Hardwick, Elizabeth, 26
Harlem, 5, 15, 36
Harvard University, 34–35
Harvey, Gabriel, 56
Hattie (Wilson’s maid), 97, 98, 100
Hellman, Geoffrey, 19
Hellman, Lillian, 7, 61, 117–18, 121
Hemingway, Ernest, 16, 73, 121
Henderson the Rain King (Bellow), 14
Henle, Jim and Marjorie, 49
Heyday of American Communism, The (Klehr), 17
Hicks, Granville, 30, 55
Hidden Northwest, The (Cantwell), 7
Hiss, Alger, 40
Hitler, Adolf, 2, 37, 85, 86
Hollering, Franz, 97
Hook, Sidney, 41, 82, 103
Hooker, Richard, 56
Hotel and Restaurant Employees’ Union, 17
How I Grew (McCarthy), 117
Howland, Harold, 13, 44
Howland, Lois Sandison, 12, 13, 44, 53, 55, 74
Huberman, Leo, 61
Hugo, Jean, 13
Humanists (American), 23–24
I, Claudius (Graves), 28
“I Got the Blues” (Odets), 4
In Dubious Battle (Steinbeck), 28
Irving, Washington, 7
I Thought of Daisy (Wilson), 93
I Went to Pit College (Gilfillan), 8–10
James, Henry, 36, 71
Jews, 2, 5, 14, 59–61, 68, 79–80, 123
John Reed Club, 23, 24, 82
Johnsrud, Harold Cooper (“John”), 97, 118
death of, 44, 120
McCarthy’s abandonment of, 35–39, 42, 48, 51–52, 62, 72, 110, 116
as McCarthy’s first husband, 1, 3–6, 8, 11–17, 19–27, 32–33, 74, 115
plays of, 4–5, 25, 55, 120
Jonson, Ben, 55–56
Joyce, James, 25, 76, 77
Kaltenborn, H. V., 70–71
Kaltenborn Edits the News, 70–71
Kamenev, L. B., 26, 35, 85
Kant, Immanuel, 101, 125
Katz, Florine, 59, 105
Katz, Gene, 59
Kimball, Win, 111
Kirchwey, Freda, 29–30, 32, 58
Kitchel, Ann (“Miss Kitchel”), 52–55, 71, 87, 103, 120, 124
Klehr, Harvey, 17
Knox, Sam, 16
Knox, Sylvia, 16
Kormendi, Lazslo, 49
Kronenberger, Louis, 26, 61
Krutch, Joseph Wood, 10, 28, 29
La Follette, Robert, 16, 119
Land of Plenty, The (Cantwell), 7
Larsen, Nella, 27
Lauchheimer, Alan. See Barth, Alan
Laugh and Lie Down (Cantwell), 7
Laughlin, James (“Jay”), 50
League of American Writers, 72–73, 85, 122
LeBoutiller, Peggy, 16
Le Gallienne, Eva, 3, 116
Lenin, Vladimir, 65
Letters on Literature and Politics (Wilson), 10
Lewis, John L., 34
Liberator, 87
Lincoln, Victoria, 28
Locke, John, 56
Lockwood, Helen, 7, 74, 117, 122
Loeb, Harold, 16
Lost Generation, 117
Lovestone, Jay, 4, 116
Luce, Henry, 15, 21, 34
Lydgate, Bill and Kay Dana, 20–21
Lyons, Leonard, 5
McCarthy, Joseph, 87
McCarthy, Kevin (brother), 112–14
McCarthy, Louis (uncle), 112
McCarthy, Preston (brother), 112–14
Macdonald, Dwight, 16, 18–19, 71–72, 73, 119, 122
as Partisan Review editor, 24, 66–67, 76, 83, 89, 119
Macdonald, Nancy, 16, 19, 71, 83
McGahan, Martha, 20, 48, 72, 114, 119
McLean, Kay, 16
MacLeish, Archibald, 34
MacMurray, Fred, 1, 43
Malraux, André, 26, 73
Mangold, Bill, 15, 61–62, 63, 65–66
“Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt, The” (McCarthy), 50, 120. See also Black, George
Mann, Erika, 74
Man’s Fate (Malraux), 26
Marching, Marching (Weatherwax), 28
Marprelate Controversy, 55–56
Marshall, Margaret (“Peggy”), 48
as McCarthy’s collaborator, 29–33, 91, 96
as Nation editor, 10, 29, 66
and Wilson, 91–97, 104, 106–7, 126
Martin, Edmond, 47–49
Marx, Karl, 26, 34, 35, 69, 81
Marxism, 8, 17, 22, 69, 81, 91
Marxist criticism, 7, 55
Masses, The, 87
Mead, Margaret, 103
Memoirs of Hecate County (Wilson), 100, 125
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (McCarthy), 115
Menotti, Gian-Carlo, 80
Merlin, Frank, 4, 5–6, 97
Meyer, Bis, 14
Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 103, 123
Miller, Margaret, 12, 118
Miscellany News, 15
Misch, Bob, 59–61
Mitchell, Mrs. Langdon, 14
Mizener, Arthur, 35
Modernism, 25
More, Paul Elmer, 23
Morris, George L. K., 24, 66, 67, 76, 92
Moscow Trials, 26–27, 35, 57–59, 67, 73, 85–86, 90
Murphy, Esther, 17
Murphy, Gerald, 17
Mussolini, Benito, 65
“My Confession” (McCarthy), 39, 40, 57
Nashe, Thomas, 56, 120
Nation, The, 26, 29, 73, 91, 120
McCarthy’s work for, 3, 10, 23, 27–33, 51, 63, 64, 72
Rahv’s work for, 66, 76, 95
New Masses, 18, 30, 52, 55, 56, 57, 67
New Republic, The, 3, 6–10, 117
New Yorker, The, 13, 19
New York Herald Tribune, 10–11, 29
New York Times, The, 11, 29, 30, 31
New York World, 17
Nin, Andrés, 61, 85, 121
Obermeier, Mike, 17
O’Casey, Sean, 6
Odets, Clifford, 4–5, 22, 97
Olson, Floyd, 27
On the Contrary (McCarthy), 39
Orwell, George, 43, 121
“Our Critics” (McCarthy and Marshall), 29–33, 91
Paris, Rosemary, 35
Paris Herald, 1, 36, 116
Parker, Dorothy, 16–17, 119
Partisan Review, 80–81, 120
contributors to, 121, 122–23, 124–25
courts Wilson, 88–92, 94
editors of, 23–24, 66–67, 71, 74, 76, 80–82, 83, 118, 119
McCarthy as theatre critic for, 75, 103
McCarthy’s introduction to, 23–24, 83
Partisan View, A (Phillips), 73, 82
Personal History (Sheean), 28
Peterson, Dorothy, 27
Phillips, William, 72–73, 81, 82, 84–85, 122
Pins and Needles, 62
Popular Front, 2
Porter, John, 55
death of, 39, 42–43
McCarthy’s abandonment of, 43–45, 48, 51–52
McCarthy’s relationship with, 1–3, 15, 35–45, 116
parents of, 36–37, 42, 43
POUM, 61, 85, 121
PR. See Partisan Review
Preston, Harold, 44, 51, 69, 87–88, 101–2, 114, 126
Prokosch, Frederick, 72
Proust, Marcel, 96
Puritanism, in New Masses, 55–56
Pyatakov, Grigory L., 59, 85
Radek, Karl B., 59, 85
Rahv, Naomi, 66
Rahv, Philip, 96, 122, 123
background and youth of, 65, 78–80, 81–82
McCarthy’s abandonment of, 97–99, 102–10, 114
McCarthy’s affair with, 62, 63, 65–88, 91, 94, 95–97, 118
as Partisan Review editor, 23–24, 66–67, 71, 74–76, 91–92, 93, 118, 119
personality of, 80, 95, 96
Rand, Christopher, 14–15, 20, 48
Rand, Maddie Aldrich, 14–15, 20, 48, 119
Ransom, John Crowe, 24
Realism, 64, 84
Red Army, 85, 86
Retour de l’U.R.S.S. (Gide), 75
Revolution Betrayed, The (Trotsky), 92
Rodman, Eunice. See Clark, Eunice
Rodman, Nancy. See Macdonald, Nancy
Rodman, Selden, 16–17, 19–20, 22, 27, 63
“Rogue’s Gallery” (McCarthy), 11
Rome, Harold (“Hecky”), 62
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 34, 66, 84
Rosenberg, Harold, 84, 104, 123
Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, 23
Rosenfeld, Paul, 90
Rousuck, Emmanuel J. (“Mannie”), 11, 18, 51, 52, 106, 118
Rubin, Jay, 17
Rumsey, David and Julia, 20
Sandison, Helen (“Miss Sandison”), 11, 52–57, 71, 90, 114, 118, 120, 122, 124
Sandison, Lois. See Howland, Lois Sandison
Saturday Review of Literature, The, 29
Savoy Ballroom (Harlem), 15, 27
Schlesinger, Arthur, 71
Schrifte, Evelyn, 49
Schwartz, Delmore, 76, 104, 122
Scottsboro Boys, 18
Second Congress of the League of American Writers, 72, 85, 122
Seven Who Fled (Prokosch), 72
Sheean, Vincent, 28
Sheridan, Margaret, 115
Sherman, Stuart, 23
Shriver, Myers, 2, 93, 115
Socialism, 2, 6, 26, 33, 65, 67, 69, 72
Solow, Herbert, 74, 84, 100
So Red the Rose (Young), 28
Spanish Civil War, 35, 61, 72–73, 85, 121
Spenser, Edmund, 56
Stalin, Joseph, 86, 116. See also GPU; Moscow Trials
Stalinism, 10, 15, 23, 42, 57–58, 60–61, 64, 71, 72–73, 85–86, 114, 123
Stein, Gertrude, 25–26
Steinbeck, John, 28, 64
Sternberg, Harry, 13, 118
Stewart, Donald Ogden, 73, 121–22
Stolberg, Ben, 30–31, 33–35, 94
Strachey, John, 17–18, 82, 122
Strasberg, Lee, 5, 116–17
Strauss, Harold, 64
Summer Will Show (Warner), 28
Sun Also Rises, The (Hemingway), 16
Swan, Mrs. Joseph, 81, 108–9
Swan, Nathalie, 12, 20, 44, 72, 74, 83–84, 118
Tate, Allen, 24
Tender Is the Night (Fitzgerald), 17
Theater Union, 3, 4, 5, 18
Time, 7
Travels in Two Democracies (Wilson), 90
Trees (Wilson’s home), 96–97, 98, 99, 100, 106, 109, 113, 125
Tresca, Carlo, 97, 125
Trilling, Diana, 73–74
Triple Thinkers, The (Wilson), 124
Trotsky, Leon, 41, 57–58, 69, 72, 74, 84, 90, 92
Trotskyism, 4, 26, 61, 67, 71, 73–74, 84, 87, 103, 114. See also Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky
Troy, William, 76, 103, 122
Tukhachevsky, M. N., 85–86
Ulysses (Joyce), 25
“University” (Johnsrud), 25
Valéry, Paul, 84
Van Doren, Irita, 10–11
Variety, 6
Vassar College, 15, 99
McCarthy’s attendance at, 1, 8, 28, 35, 52, 71, 87, 90, 103, 117, 118, 120, 124
McCarthy’s friends and enemies from, 5, 74, 116, 118, 119, 122
Villard, Oswald Garrison, 30, 120
Waiting for Lefty (Odets), 4, 5
Waldorf strike, 16–17
Walker, Adelaide, 4, 84
Walker, Charles, 4
Warner, Sylvia Townsend, 28
Waste Land, The (Eliot), 77
Weatherwax, Clara, 28
Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, 14
Webster Hall dances, 3, 15, 61
Welty, Eudora, 64
Weston (Porter’s collaborator), 37–38, 40–41
Williams, Tony, 15–16
Willkie, Wendell, 50
Wilson, Edmund (“Bunny”)
influence of, on McCarthy’s writing, 103–4
McCarthy leaves, 54–55
McCarthy’s marriage to, 109–14, 116, 125
McCarthy’s relationship with, 88–114, 124, 125, 126
As New Republic editor, 6, 10, 117
political views of, 59, 121
relations of, with women, 100, 103, 111–12, 123
Wilson, Mrs. (Edmund’s mother), 105–6, 109–12
Wilson, Reuel, 18, 54, 105–6
Wilson, Rosalind, 111
Winchell, Walter, 5
Wine and Food Society, 59–60
Winterset (Anderson), 1, 22, 35
Wolfson, Martin, 3
Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 36
Woollcott, Alexander, 16, 119
World Series, 49–50
WPA, 66, 105
Writers’ Congress, 72, 85, 122
Writers’ Project, 66, 76, 105
Yale University, 34–35, 99
Young, Art, 57
Young, Stark, 28
Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, The (Farrell), 22
Zinoviev, G. Y., 26, 35, 85
Zugsmith, Leane, 61
A Biography of Mary McCarthy
Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) was an American critic, public intellectual, and author of more than two dozen books, including the 1963 New York Times bestseller The Group.
McCarthy was born on June 21, 1912, in Seattle, Washington, to Roy Winfield McCarthy and Therese (“Tess”) Preston McCarthy. McCarthy and her three younger brothers, Kevin, Preston, and Sheridan, were suddenly orphaned in 1918. While the family was en route from Seattle to a new home in Minneapolis, both parents died of influenza within a day of one another.
After being shuttled between relatives, the children were finally sent to live with a great-aunt, Margaret Sheridan McCarthy, and her husband, Myers Shriver. The Shrivers proved to be cruel and often sadistic adoptive parents. Six years later, Harold Preston, the children’s maternal grandfather and an attorney, intervened. The children were split up, and Mary went to live with her grandparents in their affluent Seattle home. McCarthy reflects on her turbulent youth, Catholic upbringing, and subsequent loss of faith in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957) and How I Grew (1987).
A week after graduating from Vassar in 1933, McCarthy moved to New York City and married Harold Johnsrud, an aspiring playwright. They divorced three years later, but many aspects of their relationship would resurface in the unhappy marriage of Kay Strong and Harald Petersen in The Group. In the late 1930s, McCarthy became a member of the Partisan Review circle and worked actively as a theater and book critic, contributing to a wide range of publications, such as the Nation, the New Republic, Harper’s Magazine, and the New York Review of Books.
In 1938, McCarthy married Edmund Wilson, an established writer; together, they had a son named Reuel, born the same year. Wilson encouraged McCarthy to write fiction, and her first book, a novel entitled The Company She Keeps (1942), satirizes the mores of bohemian New York intellectuals from the point of view of an acerbic female protagonist. Her second book, The Oasis, a thinly disguised roman à clef about the Partisan Review intellectuals, won the English monthly magazine Horizon’s fiction contest in 1949.
Soon after her divorce from Wilson in 1945, McCarthy married Bowden Broadwater, a staff member of the New Yorker, and also taught literature at Bard College and Sarah Lawrence College. A Charmed Life (1955), a novel about the rollercoaster experience of a shaky marriage in a quirky artists’ community, is based on her life with Wilson in Wellfleet, Cape Cod. The Groves of Academe (1951), a campus satire informed by her teaching positions, casts an ironic gaze on the foibles of academics. Randall Jarrell’s novel Pictures from an Institution (1954) is said to be about McCarthy’s time at Sarah Lawrence, where he also taught.
In the 1950s, McCarthy took a strong interest in European history. Her two books about Italy, Venice Observed (1956) and The Stones of Florence (1959), combine art criticism, political theory, and reportage to bring the two cities’ histories to life. While on a lecture tour in Poland for the United States Information Agency in 1959 and 1960, McCarthy met the public affairs officer for the US Embassy in Warsaw, James West. McCarthy and West left their respective partners and were married in 1961.
McCarthy’s most popular literary success came in 1963 with the publication of her novel The Group, which remained on the New York Times bestseller list for almost two years, and was made into a movie by Sidney Lumet in 1966.
McCarthy remained an outspoken critic of politics in the decades that followed. Openly opposing the Vietnam War in the 1960s, she traveled to South Vietnam and wrote a series of articles for the New York Review of Books that were subsequently published as Vietnam (1967). Her coverage of the Watergate hearings in the 1970s is the basis for The Mask of State (1975). Her famous libel feud with writer Lillian Hellman, stemming from McCarthy’s appearance on the Dick Cavett Show in 1979, formed the basis for the play Imaginary Friends (2002) by Nora Ephron.
McCarthy won a number of literary awards, including the Horizon magazine prize (1949) and two Guggenheim Fellowships (1949–1950 and 1959–1960). She also received both the Edward MacDowell Medal and the National Medal for Literature in 1984. She was a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy in Rome. She received honorary degrees from numerous universities including Bard College, Smith College, and Syracuse University.
McCarthy passed away on October 25, 1989. The second volume of her autobiography was published posthumously in 1992 as Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936–1938.
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