Mary McCarthy Books In Order

The Company She Keeps

This is the author’s first novel, which relates the experiences of a young bohemian intellectual. The six episodes create a fascinating portrait of a New York social circle of the 1930s. McCarthy s bold insight and virtuoso style won her immediate recognition as one of the most accomplished, versatile, and penetrating writers in americanca.

The Oasis

The Oasis, McCarthy’s second novel, won a contest orgnized by Cyril Connelly, the British critic and editor of the prestigious literary magazine Horizon, and was first published as the February 1949 edition of that magazine. Connelly called the book ‘brilliant and true and funny and beautifully written and intelligently thought and felt.’

The Oasis is a wickedly satiric roman a clef about a group of urban American intellectuals who try unsuccessfully to establish a rural utopian colony just as the Cold War is setting in and fear of the atomic bomb is reaching panic proportions. At its appearance a few months later in the U.S., the novel caused a scandel, alienating a number of McCarthy’s friends.

One of her former lovers, the critic Philip Rahv, was so upset at the character based on him that he tried to stop its publication. At the same time, a then relatively new acquaintance who later became McCarthy’s closest friend, Hannah Arendt, wrote her: ‘I just read The Oasis and must tell you that it was pure delight. You have written a veritable little masterpiece.’

The Groves Of Academe

Henry Mulcahy, a literature instructor at progressive Jocelyn College, is informed that his appointment will not be continued. Convinced he is disliked by the president of Jocelyn because of his abilities as a teacher and his independence of mass opinion, Mulcahy believes he is being made the victim of a witch hunt. Plotting vengeance, Mulcahy battles to fight for justice and, in the process, reveals his true ethical nature.

A Charmed Life

Martha Sinnott returns with her second husband to the New England artists’ colony she left behind seven years earlier when she divorced her first husband. The townfolk have remained much the same, including Martha’s former husband, who has relocated nearby. Martha is in touch with her former friends, who are in touch with her former husband, so Martha should be able to see him as well, shouldn’t she?

The Group

Written with a trenchant, sardonic edge, The Group is a dazzlingly outspoken novel and a captivating look at the social history of America between two world wars. Mary McCarthy’s most celebrated novel follows the lives of eight Vassar graduates, known simply to their classmates as The Group. An eclectic mix of personalities and upbringings, they meet a week after graduation to watch Kay Strong get married. After the ceremony, the women begin their adult lives traveling to Europe, tackling the worlds of nursing and publishing, and finding love and heartbreak in the streets of New York City. Through the years, some of the friends grow apart and some become entangled in each other’s affairs, but all vow not to become like their mothers and fathers. It is only when one of them pas*ses away that they all come back together again to mourn the loss of a friend, a confidante, and most importantly, a member of The Group.

The Birds of America

The electrifying portrait of an idealistic young man who is an unwilling witness to the changes in society and its values. Here is a book that captures the very essence of the 1960s and is at the same time as fresh today as when it was first published in 1965.

Cannibals & Missionaries

A suspenseful and sometimes horrifying novel of manners, whose plot and odd mix of characters combine to produce an unorthodox thriller about the hijacking of a Middle East bound jetliner over France in early 1975. ‘Psychologically astute, ironic and ultimately heartbreaking’Publishers Weekly.

Cast a Cold Eye

The seven stories collected here showcase McCarthy’s formidable powers of observation, her deliciously witty writing style, and her celebrated talent for dissecting characters with biting acuity. A young woman looks for subtle and not so subtle ways to escape her unsatisfying marriage; an innocuous single man’s friends realize his companionship has an enormous price; and an Italian guide puzzles a traveling pair of Americans.

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

This unique autobiography begins with McCarthy’s recollections of an indulgent, idyllic childhood tragically altered by the death of her parents in the influenza epidemic of 1918. Tempering the need to fictionalize for the sake of a good story with the need for honesty, she creates interchapters that tell the reader what she has inferred or invented. Photographs.

How I Grew

How I Grew explores the young adulthood of MaryMcCarthy, one of the most outspoken and prominentintellectuals of the twentieth century. Focusing on eight formativeyears of her life from high school in the Seattle areathrough college at Vassar McCarthy reveals a girl by turnsvulnerable, independent, dramatic, lonely, inquisitive,romantic, demonstrably bright, and uncommonly daring. In candid, often intimate detail, How I Grew recountsMcCarthy’s early attempts at writing; her relationships withteachers, family, and friends; a melodramatic flirtation withsuicide; and experiences as dissimilar as her first job and herfirst seduction.A natural companion to the much praised Memories of aCatholic Girlhood, this is a remarkable personal chronicle, anutterly convincing self portrait, and a superb addition to theart of the autobiography.

Between Friends

Mary McCarthy, the prominent American writer, and political philosopher Hannah Arendt, who had fled from Na*zi Germany, first met in New York. They soon became friends and began a remarkable 25 year exchange of letters, here reproduced in its entirety. Mary McCarthy was an ardent correspondent, whose letters served her autobiographical impulse and her delight in writing as a means of ordering experience. Hannah Arendt’s letters bring her tender voice and keen intelligence to life on the page. Even as they traded ideas about politics, literature and morality, they also shared personal advice and delightful gossip.