Happy Birthday, Mary McCarthy

Born June 21, 1912, Seattle, WA | Died October 25, 1989, New York City, NY

Today, the Best American Essays newsletter celebrates novelist, political essayist, and critic Mary Therese McCarthy on the 113th anniversary of her birth. Best known for her novels The Groves of Academe (1952) and The Group (1963) and her satirical styling, McCarthy was a dynamic and decorated writer.

Subscribe to our newsletter for news about upcoming online conversations with Best American Essays contributors about essayists.

Mary McCarthy in 1963, photographer unknown.

“We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.”

The Group (1963) is the most popular of McCarthy’s works, and it remained on the New York Times Best Seller list for almost two years; it was also adapted into a film. The Seventeenth Degree (1974) collects McCarthy’s essays on the Vietnam War, which she wrote between 1967-1972 after visiting the country several times. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1972) chronicles McCarthy’s childhood after she was orphaned at age six because of her parents’ death from the 1918 influenza pandemic. Two additional volumes of autobiographical work followed, How I Grew (1987) and Intellectual Memoirs, published posthumously in 1992.

McCarthy (at right) is pictured here with her longtime friend Hannah Arendt, likely in the 1970s. Photographer unknown.

“There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing. A truth is something that everyone can be shown to know and to have known, as people say, all along.”

First notable essay:

“Circus Politics in Washington State,” The Nation, 1936.

Select Nonfiction Bibliography:

• The Collected Essays, Volume One (Open Road Media, 2018).

• The Collected Memoirs (Open Road Media, 2013).

• Sherli Evens Goldman, Mary McCarthy: A Bibliography (Harcourt, 1968).

See also, works about the author by writers whose essays have appeared/been listed in Notables in The Best American Essays series: 

Vivian Gornick, “The Company They Kept,” The New Yorker, 2013.

Doris Grumbach, The Company She Kept (Coward McCann, Inc., 1967).

Visit the Mary McCarthy Society’s website.

Read Reuel K. Wilson, “Growing up with Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy,” The Paris Review, 1999.