Biographies

Brightman, Carol. Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World. New York: C. N. Potter, 1992, 714 p.

Depicts McCarthy in the context of her intellectual milieu.

Gelderman, Carol. Mary McCarthy: A Life. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988, 430 p.

Shows the writer in relation to her family, friends, enemies, and lovers.

Criticism

Dickstein, Morris. "A Glint of Malice." The Threepenny Review XV, No. 3 (Fall 1994): 29-30.

Frequently refers to stories in McCarthy's The Company She Keeps while examining the reasons for the rise and gradual decline of McCarthy's literary reputation.

Eisinger, Chester E. "Mary McCarthy as the Sceptical New Liberal." In his Fiction of the Forties, pp. 128-35. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963.

Contends that McCarthy was an author who displayed the attitude of a sceptical new liberal, meaning that she was suspicious not only of political creed and moral code but also of human reason. Eisinger uses The Company She Keeps, Cast a Cold Eye, and the novella The Oasis to support his claim.

Fitch, Robert E. "The Cold Eye of Mary McCarthy." The New Republic 138, No. 18 (5 May 1958): 17-19.

Maintains that McCarthy's fiction suffers because it focuses on the intellectual and physical dimensions of humans while excluding consideration of compassion, affection, and "moral emotion." Fitch mentions several stories and the novella The Oasis.

Fitts, Dudley. "Portraits Cut in Acid." The New York Times Book Review (24 September 1950): 9.

Favorable review of Cast a Cold Eye. Fitts admires the style of the writing in particular.

Gay, Robert M. A review of The Company She Keeps. The Atlantic Monthly CLXX (August 1942): 109.

Adding to the debate about the classification of The Company She Keeps as a novel or short story collection, Gay states: "The method and structure give the impression that the chapters were written without reference to one another and then were somewhat highhandedly brought together by means of the tenuous theme of lost personality. The result is discontinuity and lack of cumulative effect."

Gottfried, Alex, and Davidson, Sue. "Utopia's Children: An Interpretation of Three Political Novels." Western Political Quarterly XV, No. 1 (March 1962): 17-32.

Contrasts the novella The Oasis to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance and Harvey Swados's False Coin, all of which are about "Utopian experiments carried out in an American setting contemporary with the author's time."

Halsband, Robert. "Jaundiced Eye .... " The Saturday Review 33, No. 40 (7 October 1950): 23.

Highly complimentary assessment of Cast a Cold Eye, which is cited as proof that McCarthy "has a terrifying talent." Halsband states: "Miss McCarthy casts a distinctly jaundiced eye on all the characters who pass before her, including—and this is her saving grace—herself."

Hardy, Willene Schaefer. The Company She Keeps. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1981, 214 p.

Contains chapters on The Company She Keeps and the novella The Oasis.

Marshall, Margaret. A review of The Oasis. The Nation CLXIX (17 September 1949): 281-82.

Claims that The Oasis "is not serious either as a work of art or as the satiric comment it purports to be on our contemporary intellectual and political life."

Munson, Gorham. "Parlor Pinks Playing Utopia." The Saturday Review of Literature XXXII (20 August 1949): 12.

Judges The Oasis to be a comedy. According to Munson, "Some advance readers have called it a satire but [McCarthy] seems to me too close to her material, too much identified with it herself to gain a satiric point of view toward it."

Rago, Henry. A review of The Oasis. Commonweal L (9 September 1949): 536-37.

Faults The Oasis as detached and intellectualized. As Rago states: "You settle for a kind of intellectual slapstick . . . in Mary McCarthy's best fiction (except in that wonderful short story 'The Cicerone')."

Stock, Irvin. Mary McCarthy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1968, 47 p.

Stock focuses on McCarthy's novels but does mention her other works. This study, with slight revision, was published as "The Novels of Mary McCarthy" in Fiction as Wisdom: From Goethe to Bellow.

Warren, Robert Penn. "Button, Button." Partisan Review IX, No. 6 (November-December 1942): 535-40.

'Describes The Company She Keeps as "a shrewd, witty, malicious, original, and often brilliantly written book" but expresses some uncertainty about the purported intention of McCarthy's satire and the heroine's search for identity.

Wilford, Hugh. "An Oasis: The New York Intellectuals in the Late 1940s." Journal of American Studies 28, No. 2 (August 1944): 209-23.

Proposes that "The Oasis should be read not as an indictment of radicalism, but rather as a sympathetic—and very perceptive—imaginative enquiry into the causes of radical failure."

Additional coverage of McCarthy's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Gale Research: Contemporary Authors, Vols. 5-8 (rev. ed.), 129; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 16, 50; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 1, 3, 5, 14, 24, 39, 59; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 2; Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, 1981; and Major 20th-century Writers.