Mary McCarthy

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Mary McCarthy (1963)

Mary Therese McCarthy (born June 21, 1912 in Seattle , † October 25, 1989 in New York City ) was an American writer and suffragette .

Life

Mary McCarthy lost her parents at the age of six. She was brought up Protestant, Catholic and Jewish by her guardians. She attended the Mesdames of the Sacred Heart Convent in Seattle, the Annie Wright Seminary in Tacoma, and Vassar College . After completing her studies with a BA, she wrote reviews from 1933 to 1937 mostly of fiction for the magazines The Nation and The New Republic . From the end of 1937 to 1938 she was an editorial member of the Partisan Review responsible for theater reviews . From 1938 she began to write her own short stories, which were collected in 1942 under the title The Company She Keeps (Eng. You and the others , 1965) published.

Mary McCarthy also became known because of her friendship with Hannah Arendt . Their friendly, philosophical correspondence achieved world fame. Mary McCarthy was the administrator of Hannah Arendt's estate.

McCarthy took part in debates of the New York Intellectuals in a contentious and committed manner . She was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1960 and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1973.

She was married four times. Her son Reuel Wilson comes from her second marriage to the writer Edmund Wilson. In April 1961 she married the diplomat James West.

Her greatest commercial success as an author was the novel Die Clique ( The Group ), published in 1962 , which partly has autobiographical features and as a chronicle with satirical features depicts the lives of eight former students. The novel, which also caused a sensation because of its liberally designed sexual scenes, stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for almost two years .

Mary McCarthy, who at times sympathized with Trotskyism , was a sharp critic of the Vietnam War . Even more than 30 years after the end of the war, her two reports Vietnam Report (1967) and Hanoi 1968 (1968) are valued as profound background reports that were written about the situation in Vietnam during the US engagement.

Works

  • The Company She Keeps (1942), German You and the Others (1965)
  • The Oasis (1949), German Die Oase (1965)
  • The Groves of Academe (1952)
  • A Charmed Life (1955), German Der Zauberkreis (1967)
  • Venice Observed (1956).
    • German from Ursula von Zedlitz: Venice . Droemer Knaur, Munich 1968.
  • Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), German Eine Katholische Kindheit . Translated by Maria Dessauer. (1966)
  • The Stones of Florence (1959), German Florence (1960)
  • The Group (1962), German Die Clique (1964) ( No. 1 on the Spiegel bestseller list in 1964 and 1965 )
  • Vietnam (1967), German Vietnam Report (1967)
  • Hanoi 1968 (1968), German Hanoi (1968)
  • The Writing on the Wall (1970), German A bolt from the blue (1970)
  • Birds of America (1971), German A Son of the New World (1971)
  • The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits (1974)
  • Cannibals and Missionaries (1979), German cannibals and missionaries (1981)
  • Ideas and the Novel (1980)
  • How I Grew (1987)
  • Intellectual Memoirs (1992), German memoirs of an intellectual (published in 1997 as a supplement to McCarthy's autobiography What changes is only the imagination: memories )

Correspondence

  • Arendt, Hannah and McCarthy, Mary: Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy. 1949-1975 . Edited by Carol Brightman, New York 1995 (German in trust. Correspondence 1949–1975 . Piper, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-492-03720-8 ).

Filmography

Literary source:

  • 1990: Seductive Stories ( Women & men: Stories of Seduction )
  • 1965: The Clique ( The Group )
  • 1950: The Petty Girl ( The petty girl )

Script:

  • 1946: Sister Kenny ( Sister Kenny )

Web links

Commons : Mary McCarthy  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Mary McCarthy: A Catholic Childhood . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1997.
  2. ↑ See Günther Deimer: Mary McCarthy. In: Martin Christadler (Ed.): American literature of the present in single representations (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 412). Kröner, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 , pp. 299-325, here p. 323.
  3. ↑ See Martin Schulze: History of American Literature . Propylaen-Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-549-05776-8 , p. 505.
personal data
SURNAME McCarthy, Mary
ALTERNATIVE NAMES McCarthy, Mary Therese (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer and suffragette
DATE OF BIRTH June 21, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Seattle
DATE OF DEATH October 25, 1989
Place of death New York City