McCarthy, Mary [Therese]
McCarthy, Mary [Therese]( 1912–89),born in Seattle, was orphaned as a child and reared by diverse relatives, as she recalled in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), a memoir continued in How I Grew (1987), dealing with her experience and intellectual development from age 13 to 21. After graduation from Vassar (1933) she became a drama critic of the Partisan Review, and her reviews and articles from 1937 to 1956 were collected in Sights and Spectacles (1956). She also taught English briefly at Bard and at Sarah Lawrence College. She was wed to and divorced from Edmund Wilson. She wrote Venice Observed (1956) and The Stones of Florence (1959), descriptive profiles of two cities she knows well, and published literary essays in On the Contrary (1961), The Writing on the Wall (1970), and Ideas and the Novel (1980), but is best known for social commentary and fiction. Her novels are...
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