Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy Book

"To see Mary McCarthy plain is not quite so simple as it sounds," writes Frances Kiernan, a comment amply borne out in her many-faceted biography of one of America's most famous and controversial women of letters. Interspersing her narrative and analysis of McCarthy's life (1912-1989) with lengthy direct quotes from the writer's friends, lovers, colleagues, and enemies, Kiernan tries to blend the depth of a critical biography with the immediacy of oral history. The mixture doesn't always quite gel, but McCarthy's forceful personality emerges with intimacy and pungency from the chorus of disparate opinions. Her character was formed by her parents' early deaths, a miserable childhood redeemed by intellectual stardom in school, and scads of poorly judged sexual entanglements (including a ghastly seven years wed to Edmund Wilson) that ended only with her happy fourth marriage. There's little in McCarthy's life that isn't already familiar to readers of her fiction, from The Company She Keeps to The Group, and her liberal political convictions are also a matter of record, not least from her own journalism and essays. Kiernan's achievement is to reveal a woman best known for her slashing intellect and feared for her ferocious critical judgments as very human and surprisingly vulnerable. --Wendy Smith Read More

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  • Product Description

    At last, a biography absorbing enough to do justice to one of the most controversial American intellectuals of this century. Beautiful, reckless, and endlessly maddening, Mary McCarthy (1912-1989) never failed to leave an impression. From her Partisan Review days as the embattled "dark lady of American letters" to her stormy marriage to (and even stormier divorce from) critic Edmund Wilson, from her huge but controversial success with her best-selling novel The Group to her epic libel battle with Lillian Hellman, she brought an almost nineteenth-century scope and drama to her emblematic twentieth-century life. Time called her "quite possibly the cleverest woman America has ever produced," and she moved in a circle of the most intellectually combative and sharpest tongued Americans of this century--all of whom had plenty to say (some of it complimentary, some distinctly not) about this vibrant woman in their midst. Frances Kiernan has interviewed dozens of McCarthy's good friends, former lovers, literary and political comrades-in-arms, awestruck admirers, amused observers, and bitter adversaries to produce a definitive biography rich in delicious gossip, ironic judgment, and eloquent testimony.

  • 0393038017
  • 9780393038019
  • Frances Kiernan
  • 2 August 2000
  • WW Norton & Co
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 384
  • illustrated edition
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