Intellectual Memoirs

New York, 1936–1938

Mary McCarthy

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781480441262
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this no-holds-barred memoir with a foreword by Elizabeth Hardwick, the bestselling author of  The Group recalls her early life in New York, revealing the genesis of and genius behind her groundbreaking fiction 
Mary McCarthy is a married twenty-four-year-old Communist and critic when this memoir begins. She's disciplined, dedicated, and sexually experimental: At one point she realizes that in twenty-four hours she "had slept with three different men." But she believes in the institution of marriage. Over the course of three years, she will have had two husbands, the second being the esteemed, much older critic Edmund Wilson. It is Wilson who becomes McCarthy's mentor and muse, urging her to try her hand at fiction.
McCarthy's powers of observation are on witty display here, as the seventy-something writer recalls events that took place half a century earlier. Her eye for the revealing detail will be recognized by readers of her novels as she describes marching in May Day parades, attending parties for the Scottsboro Boys, and witnessing firsthand the American left wing's response to the Moscow trials and the Spanish Civil War.
Picking up where  How I Grew left off and unfinished at the time of her death in 1989,  Intellectual Memoirs is a vivid snapshot of a distinctive place and time—New York in the late 1930s—and the forces that shaped Mary McCarthy's life as a woman and a writer.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author's estate.

INDEX

A | B | C | D | E
F | G | H | I | J
K | L | M | N | O
P | R | S | T
U | V | W | Y | Z

Abel, Lionel, 68, 84, 121

Adams, J. Donald, 11, 30

Adams, Léonie, 76, 103, 123

Adler, Stella, 5

Agence Havas, 3, 36

Agrarians, 24

Alden, Hortense, 22, 48

Aldrich, Maddie. See Rand, Maddie Aldrich

Aldrich, Mrs. (Maddie’s mother), 14

Algonquin Hotel, 17, 119

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 53, 57, 96–97

American Mercury, The, 29

Amlie, Tom, 27

Anderson, Maxwell, 1

Angoff, Charles, 29

“Anti-Climax” (Johnsrud), 4–5

Anti-Stalinism, 24, 67, 90, 122

Aquavella, Nick, 11

Arendt, Hannah, 96

Ashforth, Albert B., 11–12, 44

“Ash Wednesday” (Eliot), 77

Astoria (Irving), 7

Auden, W. H., 74

Awake and Sing (Odets), 4

Axel’s Castle (Wilson), 90

Balabanov, Angelica, 65

Barber, Samuel, 80

Bard College, 54–55, 119, 120

Barth, Alan, 15, 44, 61

Bartholomew Fair (Jonson), 56

Beekman Place apartments

Johnsruds’, 8, 11—12, 20, 25, 44, 48

McCarthy and Rahv’s, 67, 70, 72

Belloc, Hilaire, 28

Bellow, Saul, 14

Best, Marshall, 20, 42–43

Biberman, Abner, 3

Bible, 77–78

Bingham, Alfred, 16–17

Bishop, Elizabeth, 13, 48, 118–19

Black, George, 43, 49–51, 94

See also “Man in the Brooks

Brothers Shirt, The”

Black, Hugo, 84

Blair, Mary, 111

Blough, Frani, 5, 7, 13, 20, 38, 48, 53, 72, 116

Blue Juniata (Cowley), 7

Blum, Léon, 2

Bogan, Louise, 123

Bolshevism, 85–86, 123–24

Book and Magazine Guild, 65

Bookman, 24

Bost...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• FOREWORD
• ONE
• TWO
• THREE
• NOTES
• INDEX
• A BIOGRAPHY OF MARY MCCARTHY
• Copyright