Mary McCarthy Books in Order

Six connected episodes follow a young woman through New York's bohemian and intellectual circles. Relationships, social encounters, and conflicting ambitions expose the distance between her self-image and the judgments she makes about others.

McCarthy recalls an orphaned childhood shaped by sharply different households and religious expectations. Memories of harsh relatives, grandparents, and Catholic schooling become an inquiry into family stories, personal identity, and the difficulties of reconstructing the past.

A group of urban intellectuals attempts to establish a rural utopia in the early Cold War years. Their shared ideals soon collide with personal rivalries and incompatible expectations, turning the experiment into a satire of intellectual community.

Seven stories examine strained encounters, self-deception, and the uneasy relations between individuals and their surroundings. Tourists in Italy, a hospitalized graduate student, and a family transformed by illness reveal the satire and autobiographical tensions shaping McCarthy's fiction.

When professor Henry Mulcahy loses his position at progressive Jocelyn College, he challenges the decision through accusations and maneuvering. The resulting struggle draws colleagues into conflicting loyalties and exposes the institutional anxieties of the McCarthy era.

Playwright Martha Sinnott returns with her second husband to a New England artists' community where her former husband still lives. Renewed contact with the past unsettles her hopes for happiness and exposes dangerous patterns of self-deception.

McCarthy explores Venice through observations of its character, inhabitants, and distinctive tastes. Her portrait brings a traveler's critical eye to the city, considering the qualities that shape its atmosphere and distinguish its way of life.

Mary McCarthy collects her theatre criticism from 1937 to 1956, examining New York's stage through chronicles of its productions. The essays bring her critical perspective to the plays and performances that shaped nearly two decades of American theatrical life.

An exploration of Florence connects the city's art and architecture with its political and commercial history. McCarthy considers Dante, the Renaissance, and the Medici while examining how wealth, rivalry, and civic identity shaped cultural achievement.

These essays address politics, society, sexuality, and literature in the years after World War II. McCarthy considers figures including Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, and Dickens while confronting public controversies and the intellectual assumptions behind them.

Eight Vassar graduates enter adult life in the 1930s, carrying shared expectations into very different circumstances. Marriage, work, sexuality, and motherhood test their friendships as the lives they imagine encounter the pressures of their social world.

Nineteen-year-old Peter Levi goes to Paris to study at the Sorbonne, hoping for a thoughtful life informed by his love of birds. Political unrest and the Vietnam era complicate his effort to remain detached from the world.

Reporting from Vietnam, McCarthy examines the American war effort through encounters in Saigon and visits beyond the city. Her critical account considers official claims alongside the experiences of people living amid displacement and conflict.

Mary McCarthy recounts her wartime visit to Hanoi and examines the American role in Vietnam. Her account also includes an exchange with critic Diana Trilling over the implications of abandoning the war, extending the argument beyond her own observations.

Literary essays range from Shakespeare to Salinger, bringing McCarthy's critical attention to writers separated by centuries. The collection approaches literature through individual works and authors, gathering her judgments across a broad span of literary history.

Mary McCarthy reports on the court-martial and acquittal of Captain Ernest Medina, commander of American troops involved in the My Lai massacre. Her account examines the proceedings surrounding responsibility for one of the Vietnam War's most notorious atrocities.

McCarthy revisits her reports on the Watergate hearings, expanding her account of deception and arrogance in the Nixon administration. The resulting political portrait follows the scandal through its participants and includes a postscript addressing Nixon's pardon.

A human-rights delegation and wealthy art collectors share a flight that is hijacked by militants. Held on a Dutch farm, the passengers confront competing political demands and a chilling calculation of the relative value of artworks and human lives.

McCarthy examines the place of ideas in fiction, contrasting nineteenth-century novels with later developments. Readings of writers including Eliot, James, Balzac, and Lawrence explore how intellectual arguments interact with storytelling, character, and the authority of the narrator.

This short-fiction collection brings together the stories previously published in Cast a Cold Eye alongside two additional works, The Hounds of Summer and The Appalachian Revolution, offering a broader selection of Mary McCarthy's writing in the form.

Essays range across reading, romance, gardening, politics, and the novel, extending to an interpretation of La Traviata. A farewell to Hannah Arendt joins these reflections, linking McCarthy's literary interests with personal attachments and public concerns.

Recalling the years from thirteen to twenty-one, McCarthy traces her education and emerging independence in Seattle and at Vassar. Family, teachers, and friendships shape an account of the experiences through which her adult identity began to form.

McCarthy revisits her New York life from 1936 to 1938, before establishing herself as a fiction writer. Reviewing, communist politics, intellectual friendships, and her marriage to Harold Johnsrud illuminate a formative period of personal and political change.

Letters between Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy trace a friendship lasting more than twenty-five years. Their exchanges move between personal experience, politics, and moral questions, revealing the intimacy and intellectual disagreements sustaining their relationship.

A selection of McCarthy's essays brings together literary criticism, theater writing, and political observation across several decades. Discussions of novelists and playwrights sit alongside responses to public events, showing the range of her critical interests.