Twenty-Four Ways of Looking at Mary McCarthy: The Writer and Her Work

by Eve Stwertka, Margo Viscusi

Overview

This collection of essays by a diverse group of young academics, established critics, and well-known writers strikes an intriguing balance between scholarship and reminiscence. The only full-length book on Mary McCarthy that is not a biography, this volume contains discussions of McCarthy as a member of the New York intelligentsia, her search for a just and ethical political philosophy, and the paradox of her views on feminism. The contributors include McCarthy biographers Carol Brightman, Carol Gelderman, and Fran Kiernan; novelists Thomas Flanagan, Maureen Howard, and Thomas Mallon; Pulitzer Prize winning jourbanalist Frances Fitzgerald; and critics Morris Dickstein and Katie Roiphe. The book concludes with a moving reminiscence by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780313297762
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	11/14/1996
Series:	Contributions to the Study of World Literature , #70
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

EVE STWERTKA was a student of Mary McCarthy's at Bard College, in the late 1940s. She worked as editorial assistant on Partisan Review. Currently she is professor emerita from SUNY Farmingdale, where she taught English and held the position of Asociate Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. Stwertka writes non-fiction books for children and young adults. She is a trustee of the Mary McCarthy Literary Trust.

MARGO VISCUSI worked for eight years as secretary to Mary McCarthy in Paris and is now a trustee of the Mary McCarthy Literary Trust. She has been a writer, editor, and director of communications for three major New York foundations and at UNESCO in Paris. Viscusi has held the positions of Director of Publications at Hunter College and Executive Assistant to the President of the New York Public Library. She is a founder and current president of Poets House in New York and a director of the Corporation of Yaddo.

Table of Contents

A Note to Readers
Of Intellect and Culture
Living and Reading, by Thomas Flanagan
Of Academics and Intellectuals, by Terry Cooney
A Glint of Malice, by Morris Dickstein
Our Leading Bitch Intellectual, by Beverly Gross
Terrorists, Artists, and Intellectuals, by Margaret Scanlan
"Knowing Concerns Me": The Female Intellectual and the Consumer Idiom, by Jill Wacker
Questions of Politics and Religion
Nicola Chiaromonte, the Politics Circle, and the Search for a Postwar "Third Camp", by Gregory D. Sumner
Reimagining Politics, by Harvey Teres
The Left Reconsidered, by Alan Wald
A Very Narrow Range of Choice: Political Dilemma in The Groves of Academe, by Timothy F. Waples
Reluctant Radical: The Irish-Catholic Element, by Stacey Lee Donohue
The Uses of Ambivalence: Mary McCarthy's Jewish Politics, by Rhoda Nathan
Mind and Body
The Stink of Father Zossima: The Medical Fact in Mary McCarthy's Fiction, by Perri Klass
Frigid Women, Frozen Dinners: The Bio-Politics of "Tyranny of the Orgasm", by Priscilla Perkins
Damn My Stream of Consciousness, by Katie Roiphe
Facts in Fiction
A Single Truth, But Tell It Sharp, by Mary Ann Caws
Mary McCarthy as a Fictional Character, by Thomas Mallon
The Minotaur as Mentor: Edmund Wilson's Role in the Career of Mary McCarthy, by Avis Hewitt
Biography and Reminiscence
My Secret Sharer, by Carol Brightman
Just the Facts, Ma'am, and Nothing But the Facts: A Biographer's Reminiscence, by Carol Gelderman
Contracts and Nymphets, by Frances Kiernan
Taking Risks, by Frances Fitzgerald
Memories of Another Catholic Girlhood, by Maureen Howard
Remembrances of an Old Friend, by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

An astute collection of essays probing McCarthy's intellectual complexity and cultural transcendence without disturbing her satirical, sometimes radical, and often irreverent tone. The contributors, including powerhouses such as Carol Brightman, Thomas Flanagan, Katie Roiphe, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., analyze McCarthy's intellectual landscape and her status as "our leading bitch intellectual," the author's alliances with Nicola Chiaromonte and Hannah Arendt, the ever-changing leftist politics that intersected with Catholicism and Judaism to form a unique world view further dissected in a number of essays offering personal reminisces of the woman and her writing. The papers were originally presented in rough draft form at a Mary McCarthy conference held at Bard College, 1993. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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