Mary Mccarthy: The Complete Fiction

Description

Seventy-five years ago Mary McCarthy provoked a scandal with her electrifying debut novel, The Company She Keeps (1942), announcing the arrival of a major new voice in American literature. This volume collects this and all her subsequent work The Oasis (1949), The Groves of Academe (1952), A Charmed Life (1955), her most famous novel, The Group (1963), Birds of America (1971), and Cannibals and Missionaries (1979), as well as all eight short stories. As a special feature, this collection also contains McCarthy's 1979 essay 'The Novels that Got Away,' on her unfinished fiction.

Mary McCarthy (1912-1989), novelist, critic, and political activist, wasborn in Seattle and orphaned at age six, thereafter raised by various relativesin Minnesota and Washington. She graduated from Vassar College in 1933 andwent on to work as a critic for The New Republic, The Nation, and the PartisanReview, for which she was an editor from 1937 to 1948. She married four times,most notably in 1938 to the critic Edmund Wilson. She is the author of sevennovels as well as many other volumes of autobiography, travelogues, essays, andcriticism. Thomas Mallon, editor, is the author of eight novels, including Watergate and FellowTravelers, as well as seven books of nonfiction. He directs the creative writing program atThe George Washington University, in Washington, D.C.