Mccarthy, Mary Therese - 1912–89, American writer, b. Seattle, grad. Vassar, 1933. As drama critic for the Partisan Review (1937–45), she gained a reputation for wit, intellect, and acerbity. Her novel The Oasis (1949) satirizes left-wing intellectuals, whereas The Group (1963) satirizes an entire generation. Her other novels include Cast a Cold Eye (1950), The Groves of Academe (1952), Birds of America (1971), and Cannibals and Missionaries (1979). Among her volumes of nonfiction are Venice Observed (1956), The Stones of Florence (1959), Vietnam (1967), The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits (1974), Ideas and the Novel (1980), and How I Grew (1987). A comprehensive collection of her literary, cultural, and political writings was posthumously published as A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays (2002). She was married several times, from 1938–46 to the critic Edmund Wilson. See her memoirs, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957) and How I Grew (1985); her correspondence with Hannah Arendt (1995); biographies by C. Gelderman (1988) and F. Kiernan (2000); study by I. Stock (1968); Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World (1992) by C. Brightman. The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright© 2004, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. All rights reserved. |
Coverage begins with Montaigne, the first essayist, and stretches forward to Addison and Steele, The Spectator and The Tatler, Marivaux, William Hazlitt, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Robert Musil, Theodor Adorno, Nouvelle Revue francaise, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and across the ocean to Emerson and Thoreau, E.B. White, The New Yorker and Harper's, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion -- while also looking back to classical and medieval precursors.
More than 400 writers from around the world are included, along with geographic surveys that provide an historical framework, entries on types of essays, and entries on important single essays. Entries on closely-related genres such as letters, journals, treatises, sermons and reviews expand and explore the fluid boundaries of the essay as genre.

