Seeing Mary Plain (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Frances Kiernan
- First Published: 2000
- Type of Work: Literary biography
- Time of Work: 1912-1989
- Setting: Minneapolis; Seattle; Poughkeepsie, New York; New York City; Newport, Rhode Island; The Cape (Massachusetts); Paris; and Castine, Maine
- Principal Characters: Mary McCarthy, Kevin McCarthy, Preston McCarthy, Harold Johnsrud, Edmund Wilson, Bowden Broadwater, James West, Reuel Wilson, Hannah Arendt, Philip Rahv, Dwight Macdonald
- Genres: Nonfiction, Biography
- Subjects: 1950’s, 1960’s, 1970’s, New York, United States or Americans, France or French people, Twentieth century, Authors or writers, Europe or Europeans, New York City, Literature, 1940’s, Paris, 1910’s, 1920’s, 1930’s, 1980’s, New England, Novelists, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Maine, Washington, Rhode Island
- Locales: New York, NY, Paris, France, Massachusetts, Seattle, WA, Minneapolis, MN, Maine, Newport, RI, Poughkeepsie, NY
This is the fourth biography of Mary McCarthy. Doris Grumbach’s The Company She Kept (1967) is an incomplete but still valuable book because the biographer was able to interview her subject extensively—even though McCarthy had repudiated Grumbach’s work by the time it was published. Carol Gelderman, for Mary McCarthy: A Life (1988), had her subject’s complete cooperation and retained her confidence. Carol Brightman, for Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World (1992), enjoyed access to McCarthy and was able to supply much new information in her...
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