Mary McCarthy · Novels & Stories 1942-1963

**In the first volume of the definitive edition of her fiction, four novels and** **eight classic stories by the witty and provocative writer who defined a** **generation.**

Seventy-five years ago Mary McCarthy provoked a scandal with her electrifying debut novel, * The Company She Keeps *(1942), announcing the arrival of a major new voice in American literature. A candid, thinly-veiled portrait of the late-1930s New York intellectual scene, its penetrating gaze and creative fusion of life and literature---mutual plagiarism, - she called it--became the hallmark of McCarthy's fiction, which the Library of America now presents in full for the first time in deluxe collector's edition. *The Oasis* (1949), a wicked satire about a failed utopian community, and *The Groves of Academe* (1952), a pioneering campus novel depicting the insular and often absurd world of academia, burnished her reputation as an acerbic truth-teller, but it was with *A Charmed Life* (1955), a searing story of small-town infidelity, that McCarthy fully embraced the frank and avant-garde treatment of gender and sexuality that would inspire generations of readers and writers. Also included are all eight of McCarthy's short stories, four from her collection *Cast a Cold Eye* (1950), and four collected here for the first time.