American writer, novelist and critic, a controversial author with an outstanding body of work that includes autobiography, novels, short stories, essays, literary and dramatic criticism and books on Italian art. Her brilliant style is marked by strong personal element in her writing as well as her acerbic wit.
Mary’s mother, Tess, was reported to be the most beautiful woman in Seattle and her dad, Roy, was a charming ineffectual alcoholic. In 1918 her parents moved their four children from Seattle to Minneapolis, her father’s family hometown, where all six in the family were stricken with the flu in the pandemic of that year. Both parents died, leaving their kids in the care of their grandparents. McCarthy, the eldest, and her siblings spent the next years in Minneapolis with guardians the family had hired: Margaret and Myers Shriver, a dour, childless middle-aged couple. Shriver, once a pickle buyer and traveling salesman, now received a house from the McCarthy’s and a generous sum of $8,200 a year to feed and clothe the orphaned kids. Even though there was no shortage of money there was a definite lack of concern and love. Mary and her brother said they suspected Shriver of embezzling some of the money. At the Catholic elementary school she attended, she began to dream of becoming a Carmelite like St. Theresa of Avila, or an abbess presiding over holy nuns. It was a miserable five years as a foster child before taken in by her grandparents in Seattle.
Moving east to Vassar College where she proved to be a good student as well as eccentric and unpredictable. After earning a Phi Beta Kappa key from Vassar she moved to New York City where she meagerly supported herself by writing. She wrote extensively about her childhood, and later, her affairs. Her first novel, “The Groves of Academe” was published on 21 February 1952 and her bestseller, “The Group” on 28 August 1963.
She married first in 1933-1936, and then in February 1938; one son, and divorced in 1946. Her third marriage was in 1946 and a fourth on 15 April 1961. She also had many transient lovers whom she identified by their jobs: a man who made puppets, a publisher, a truck driver. She insisted that she was not promiscuous at the same time as relating that on a single day, she slept with three different men.
While attending a publishers party in 1936, McCarthy met novelist James Farrell and had a conversion to Trotskyism. Soon her life was filled with the elite of the New York intellectual left. Her career was a turbulent as her private life; success and failure, best-selling books along with books that gained no notice. She evoked strong feelings in others and her tongue, so clever and witty, got her into the most publicized literary squabble of the decade. While on the Dick Cavett Show, McCarthy called Lillian Hellman a dishonest writer. Hellman, as aggressive as McCarthy, responded with a lawsuit which did serious damage to both of their reputations.
Argument and dissension were her life’s blood and it supported her well into old age. McCarthy died of cancer on 25 October 1989 in New York at age 77.
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