Beautiful and reckless, supremely quick and endlessly maddening, Mary McCarthy (1912-1989) never failed to leave an impression. From her Partisan Review days as the embattled "Dark Lady of American letters" to her stormy marriage to (and even stormier divorce from) critic Edmund Wilson to her huge but ambiguous success with her best-selling novel The Group to her epic libel battle with Lillian Hellman, she brought an almost nineteenth-century scope and drama to her emblematic twentieth-century life. Time called her "quite possibly the cleverest woman America has ever produced," and she moved in a circle of the most intellectually combative and sharpest-tongued Americans of this century — all of whom had plenty to say (some of it complimentary, some distinctly not) about this vibrant woman in their midst. People are still talking, and Fran Kiernan has interviewed dozens of good friends, former lovers, literary and political comrades-in-arms, awestruck admirers, amused observers, and bitter adversaries — to produce a biography rich in delicious gossip, ironic judgment, and eloquent testimony.

Kiernan (former fiction editor, The New Yorker) makes use of interviews with McCarthy's lovers, friends, family, co-workers, casual acquaintances, and fellow writers, many of the latter constituting a pantheon of American arts and letters. Somewhere between scholarly (well-researched and cited) and popular biography (loads of gossip), Kiernan's study does not try for objectivity, but instead, a portrait that might have, she says, made McCarthy "crinkle her eyes and grin." Interviews are supported with McCarthy's archived papers at Vassar and other archives, including Elizabeth Bishop's at Vassar and Robert Lowell's at Harvard.
Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

At last, a biography rich in delicious gossip, ironic judgment, and eloquent testimony of Mary McCarthy, one of the most controversial American intellectuals of this century. of photos.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 811-814) and index.