Unless otherwise identified, quotations in this chronology come from a letter McCarthy wrote to Doris Grumbach, the first of her biographers, on February 22, 1966, in which McCarthy included her own year-by-year chronology of her life, with often revealing commentary. The letter is now among the Mary McCarthy Papers in the Special Collections of the Vassar College Library.
1912
Born Mary Therese McCarthy on June 21 in Seattle, first child of Roy and Therese Preston McCarthy. (Father, born in 1880 in Illinois to devout Catholic family, attended the University of Minnesota. Mother born 1888 in Seattle, Washington, to nominally Protestant father and Jewish mother. Parents met in 1910 at Oregon resort and were married in April 1911 despite reservations of both families—Roy McCarthy had a damaged heart and had previously been hospitalized for alcoholism. Mother converts to Catholicism. At first the couple settles in Minneapolis so that Roy can work at his father’s grain elevator business, but they move to Seattle when he starts drinking again.) In fall, father begins law school at the University of Washington and paternal grandparents purchase them a house at 934 22nd Avenue.
1914
Brother Kevin McCarthy, the eldest of Mary’s three brothers and the one to whom she would remain the closest (later a well-known actor in theater, films, and television), born February 15.
1915
Father graduates with law degree and begins to practice part-time, but by 1917 his heart condition makes it impossible for him to work. Brother James Preston born September 5.
1917
Brother Sheridan born April 26.
1918
In fall, mother enrolls McCarthy as a day student at the Forest Ridge Convent of the Sacred Heart. Family moves to Minneapolis, where paternal grandparents have purchased them a house; on three-day train journey everyone contracts Spanish flu virus. Father dies on November 6 at home of paternal grandparents; mother the next day. McCarthy and her brothers are put into the often neglectful and cruel care of Margaret and Myers Shriver, their great-aunt and great-uncle. Enrolled in St. Stephen’s, a Catholic elementary school.
1923
After a visit to Minneapolis leaves her maternal grandfather, Harold Preston, appalled, McCarthy is rescued from the Shriver household and moved to Seattle; enrolled in Forest Ridge Convent school. Brothers Kevin and Preston go to live with paternal grandparents, while Sheridan remains with the Shrivers. Given free range of grandfather’s library, and reads Dickens, Tolstoy, and The Count of Monte Cristo.
1925
Enters Garfield High School in Seattle; despite continued adventurous reading, she nearly fails all of her courses and after a year will be “removed from the excitement of boys” to an all-girls school, Annie Wright Seminary in Tacoma.
1926
Over next three years will run “away from school once, just for fun, with another girl . . . Acted in many school plays. Wrote ‘realistic’ short stories and romances rather in the manner of [British historical novelist] Maurice Hewlett which were shown to Miss Atkinson, for her private consumption. Took (strangely) cooking course one year, probably because the teacher was young and pretty. Was terrible at it.” Loses virginity in the fall of 1926 “in Marmon roadster; unpleasant experience.” English teacher Dorothy Atkinson, a recent Vassar graduate, encourages her to write short stories. Decides to attend Vassar herself, and begins the necessary three years of Latin for admission.
1928
Has additional sexual experiences with a portrait painter in Seattle; travels to Montana in the summer on vacation with two classmates. “Also knew weird circle of Lesbians, who liked to read Pierre Louÿs aloud. Introduced by friend, ‘Ted’ (Ethel) Rosenberg, alluded to in Catholic Girlhood.”
1929
Graduates from Annie Wright as class valedictorian. Does summer study at Seattle’s Cornish School; takes classes in theatre and eurythmics. Meets Harold Johnsrud (born 1904 in St. Cloud, Minnesota), who is “acting in local little theatre and having affair with eurythmics teacher. . . . Went to ‘Symphonies under the Stars,’ in the stadium, conducted by Michel Piastro. Tried to grasp music; failed. Only responded to names such as ‘Sarabande,’ ‘Scarlatti.’ ” Enters Vassar in the fall after once more meeting Johnsrud “on street of New York first day on pre-college visit with grandmother and aunt. Only person I knew in New York. Seemed like fate . . . Love affair began shortly after; lasted, with very bad vicissitudes in summer of ’32, through college . . . Cruel man, really. Liked to get power through wounding.” The strongest influences on her at Vassar are Helen Sandison and Anna Kitchel, English department professors whose aesthetic approach to literary study appeals to McCarthy more than the progressive political interpretations of their colleague Helen Drusilla Lockwood.
1932
In summer, works for art dealer Emmanuel “Manny” J. Rousuck in New York. Describes him in a letter to her friend Frani Blough as “a nice, sweet, battered soul who spends his time skulking about, avoiding the sheriff.” (Several years later she will fictionalize him as “Mr. Sheer” in “Rogue’s Gallery,” The Company She Keeps.)
1933
Publishes essay “Touchstone Ambitious” about the Elizabethan writer Sir John Harington in The Vassar Journal of Undergraduate Studies. Graduates from Vassar in mid-June and marries Johnsrud at St. George’s Episcopal Church in New York on June 21; “Wedding very much as in The Group.” Over the next few years Johnsrud is “unemployed a good deal . . . Expensive apartment (my fault), debts, no money. Did not ask family, except when had appendix out.” Begins reviewing books for The New Republic. At the end of the year writes to Frani Blough, her old Vassar classmate: “Housework and a book review or two are not effective substitutes for sixteen hours of classes a week.”
1934
Falls out with Malcolm Cowley at The New Republic over a review of Lauren Gilfillan’s I Went to Pit College, a memoir he pressured her to praise. After changing his mind about the book, Cowley prints a “correction” to what he deems an overly favorable notice by McCarthy, who has begun reviewing regularly for The Nation. On February 6, joins Selden Rodman, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, and others in a demonstration of support for striking waiters at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel.
1935
That fall, in The Nation, writes most of a much remarked upon five-part series about American book reviewing, “Our Critics, Right or Wrong.” Shares the byline with Margaret Marshall.
1936
Gets Reno divorce from Johnsrud on August 11 in order to marry a “young unemployable, John Porter, later died in Mexico, wretched circumstances. Looked like Fred MacMurray. Charm . . . Williams boy, had worked on Paris Herald.” (McCarthy had marched with Porter in a May Day parade on lower Broadway that year.) In the fall returns to New York, decides not to marry Porter; rents apartment on Gay Street in Greenwich Village. Works again for Rousuck. Develops friendship with James T. Farrell and his wife. In November, attends a book party for New Masses cartoonist Art Young, at which she bucks the Stalinist tide by saying that Trotsky deserves a fair hearing. (The Moscow Trials had begun in August.) Soon finds herself being listed on the letterhead of the Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky.
1937
Works at Covici Friede publishers and helps Ralph Craig to ghostwrite the memoirs of radio broadcaster H. V. Kaltenborn. Begins affair with Philip Rahv (born 1908 in Russia, a member of the Trotsky Defense Committee who was separated from his wife) and lives with him on Beekman Place (“borrowed apartment rich friends”) and East End Avenue. Meets literary critic for The New Republic Edmund Wilson (born 1895 in New Jersey) in the offices of the new Partisan Review, which proclaims its editorial policy in December: “Partisan Review is aware of its responsibility to the revolutionary movement in general, but we disclaim obligation to any of its organized political expressions.”
1938
Grandfather Harold Preston dies on New Year’s Day. Marries Wilson on February 10; quits publishing job and moves with Wilson to Stamford, Connecticut. “At Wilson’s insistence,” writes her first short story, “Cruel and Barbarous Treatment.” Spends three weeks in New York’s Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic after a violent altercation with Wilson on June 8, while she is two months pregnant. Wilson claims to have noticed “an acute hysterical condition,” but McCarthy receives a diagnosis of anxiety. She refuses Wilson’s suggestion that she have an abortion. In August, returns to Stamford and writes for Partisan Review. Her only child, Reuel Kimball Wilson, is born December 25.
1939
Accompanies Wilson to Chicago while he teaches in the university’s summer term. In late July, McCarthy and Reuel visit her grandmother, Augusta Morgenstern Preston, in Seattle. In October, Wilsons rent house in Truro, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. Johnsrud, her first husband, dies on December 23 in a fire at the Hotel Brevoort in New York.
1940
In June, the Wilsons move for the summer from Truro to a house in Wellfleet. “Edmund disapproves” of the nearby presence of Philip Rahv and his wife in Provincetown. They return to Stamford in the fall; McCarthy contributes her “Theater Chronicle” to Partisan Review and writes the stories for The Company She Keeps.
1941
Living in Stamford that winter with Wilson, continues to see psychoanalyst Dr. Richard Frank (she has been his patient since late 1938) until she and Wilson move into the house he buys in Wellfleet that June. “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt” is published in July in Partisan Review.
1942
Spends winter and spring with Wilson at the Little Hotel in New York. The Company She Keeps is published in May by Simon and Schuster. John Chamberlain, the model for portions of the main character in “Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man,” reviews the book in The New York Times. Spends summer, as well as weekends during the fall, in Wellfleet; the rest of the time she is in New York, living in Stuyvesant Square. Sees another psychoanalyst, Dr. Abraham Kardiner.
1943
Rents New York apartment with Wilson and Reuel. Back at Wellfleet for the summer and in the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York that fall. Wilson begins writing for The New Yorker. Reuel begins kindergarten in New York City.
1944
Spends winter and spring at the Gramercy Park; summer in Wellfleet. Meets Italian activist Nicola Chiaromonte on Cape Cod. Leaves Wilson after a fierce argument in July but then returns by September. “The Weeds,” a short story depicting aspects of their marriage, appears in The New Yorker in September. She and Wilson live with Reuel on Henderson Place in New York that fall; he attends St. Bernard’s School. In the fall, and through early 1945, has an affair with art critic Clement Greenberg.
1945
Leaves Wilson in January and takes Reuel; they live first at the Stanhope Hotel in Manhattan, then at brother Kevin’s East 56th Street apartment. Meets Bowden Broadwater (born 1920 in Maryland, he is a recent Harvard graduate and a fact-checker at The New Yorker) at the house of Niccolò Tucci the night she leaves Wilson. Spends an “idyllic summer” (until Hiroshima—“everything different after”) with Reuel in Truro; Broadwater visits them there. Becomes “close friends” with Nicola Chiaromonte. “Tolstoy. Beach conversations. Reading Shakespeare aloud in a group—a recurrent feature in my life . . . On the beach, I translating Simone Weil’s Iliad or Poem of Force. Getting sand in my typewriter.” Works on, then abandons, a novelette called The Lost Week. In September, begins teaching at Bard College (the basis for Jocelyn College in The Groves of Academe). Gives a course on “The Modern Novel” that doesn’t go past Henry James. Reaches divorce settlement with Wilson in October.
1946
Leaves Bard College after spring semester. Makes first trip to Europe in July. Travels with Broadwater in France and Italy. Moves in with him and his sister that fall on East 57th Street in New York; they marry on December 18 (divorce from Wilson finalized days before). Reuel back at St. Bernard’s. In November, criticizes John Hersey’s Hiroshima in a letter to politics, journal edited by Dwight Macdonald.
1947
In February meets, and begins lifelong detestation of, Simone de Beauvoir. Spends summer in Pawlet, Vermont, which will become the setting for The Oasis. Broadwater works for Partisan Review in the fall. McCarthy inherits $23,250 when Louis McCarthy, her uncle, sells the McCarthy family’s grain elevator company.
1948
Teaches at Sarah Lawrence during spring semester. Publishes review of A Streetcar Named Desire, declaring that Tennessee Williams’s play “reeks of literary ambition as the [Kowalski] apartment reeks of cheap perfume.” Writes The Oasis and spends summer in Cornwall, Connecticut, seeing some “White Russian friends.” Along with Dwight Macdonald, Nicolas Nabokov, Elizabeth Hardwick, Philip Rahv, and other intellectuals, works on the formation of “Europe-America Groups,” whose manifesto says they hope “to provide some center of solidarity with and support for intellectuals in Europe . . . in the face of the extreme polarity of Soviet and American power.”
1949
The Oasis is published in Horizon magazine in February and wins the Horizon prize of £200 that fall. Rahv, recognizable in The Oasis as “Will Taub,” threatens a libel suit. Dwight Macdonald (“Macdougal Macdermott”) isn’t pleased either. Political philosopher Hannah Arendt calls the book “a gem” and her friendship with McCarthy, after an early misunderstanding, takes off. Buys a house in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, with Broadwater. Reuel at St. Michael’s School, Newport. In March, McCarthy, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Macdonald “infiltrate” the Stalinist-dominated Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria. They “make anti-Communist speeches from floor . . . amusing event; wrote bad story about it later, never published.” Receives Guggenheim Fellowship. In October, revisits Vassar for Holiday magazine article (“The Vassar Girl”), which will be published in May 1951. Suffers miscarriage in mid-November.
1950
Living in Portsmouth. In early spring, writes a ten-part article for the New York Post on nightlife in New York’s Greenwich Village. Cast a Cold Eye published by Harcourt Brace and Company (which will publish the majority of the rest of her books); it includes several short stories along with memoir pieces that will later go into Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. Begins writing The Groves of Academe.
1951
Writes “A Tin Butterfly,” which will become part of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. Finishes The Groves of Academe. “Reuel at St. George’s as a day boy.”
1952
Publishes a scathing review (“Mlle. Gulliver en Amérique”) in January of Simone de Beauvoir’s America Day by Day. At a second Waldorf Conference, she “clashe[s] with Sidney Hook, Max Eastman,” who had both turned right politically, over the behavior of Senator Joseph McCarthy. The Groves of Academe published in February. Begins writing The Group. On a train to Missouri, before giving a lecture to teachers, she meets the anti-Semitic colonel who becomes the subject of her essay “Artists in Uniform.” Prompted by concern with the state of civil liberties in America, she considers going to Harvard Law School; is dissuaded by Judge John Biggs, chief judge of the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, an old friend of Wilson’s. In October, she and Broadwater sell house in Portsmouth and buy one on Cape Cod, which happens to be close to Wilson’s home.
1953
Spends early part of year in New York’s Hotel Chelsea, often in the company of Hannah Arendt. Seeks start-up funding for a “social, political” magazine to be called Critic. “Fail to raise enough money and have run out of money myself, having abandoned novel [The Group] for time being.” Summers in borrowed house of Helvetia Perkins in Montpelier, Vermont, an experience that will go into her story “The Appalachian Revolution.” Having “agreed to stay away from Cape House when Reuel there with Edmund,” lectures at Bread Loaf School of English in summer: her talk, “Settling the Colonel’s Hash,” is a witty refutation of symbol-hunting interpretations of “Artists in Uniform.” In fall, goes to the Cape and writes story about accidental injury that Broadwater incurs to his hand. (This becomes the first chapter in A Charmed Life.) In October, rents the New York apartment of Alfred Kazin—their mutual dislike will grow with the years—to write “The Appalachian Revolution.” Serves as one of the fiction judges for the National Book Award, which goes, with her approval, to Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March.
1954
In January and February, “Dottie Makes an Honest Woman of Herself,” a version of which will become The Group’s third chapter, appears as a short story in Partisan Review. Early in the year travels to Portugal with Broadwater; a New Yorker travel piece results. Also works on A Charmed Life, “having decided to turn it into novel.” Maternal grandmother Augusta Preston dies on February 7. Spends summer on the Cape (“Edmund and I now dividing Reuel’s vacation”) and fall in Rhode Island. Randall Jarrell’s comic novel of academic manners, Pictures from an Institution, published in June, recognizably depicts McCarthy as “Gertrude Johnson.”
1955
Finishes A Charmed Life in borrowed villa on Capri. “Bowden and I on poor terms.” Travels through Italy and Greece during a difficult pregnancy. Suffers apparent miscarriage in Greece and then a “definitive” one on plane to Paris in June. A Charmed Life is published in June. Meets Reuel in London while doing a program for the BBC. Agrees to Rosamund and Georges Bernier’s proposal that she write a book on Venice, where she spends the fall doing research. “Reuel and Bowden return [to] America alone.” Goes back to New York in December, the house on the Cape having been sold after Broadwater decides they cannot go back there after A Charmed Life comes out; the novel is full of recognizable characters from Wellfleet. In reviewing the book, Time calls McCarthy “quite possibly the cleverest writer America has ever produced.”
1956
Lives on East 94th Street in New York as Broadwater begins running the library at St. Bernard’s school. Sights and Spectacles, a collection of her theater criticism, published by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. Travels to Italy in May to visit Bernard Berenson, the American art historian she had met in Venice. Spends much of the summer in Venice with Broadwater and Reuel. After Broadwater returns to New York, travels to Holland, Paris, and London—where she resumes love affair with British journalist John Davenport that began in Italy. “Crisis on return to New York.” Reuel enters Harvard. Venice Observed published in November.
1957
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood is published in late spring. “Crisis surmounted” with Broadwater. Returns to Italy in May, planning to write a book on Florence, Mantua, and Bologna. Broadwater joins her in Florence in June. “Peace restored” between them when she returns to New York in October.
1958
Back to Europe in May; the Italian book will now be all about Florence and not the other two cities. Joined in Italy by Evelyn Hofer, who takes photographs to illustrate the book, and Broadwater. Reuel spends summer working in Paris. Back in New York in the fall, she and Broadwater assemble The Stones of Florence, “layout, pictures, etc. Bowden very good at this.”
1959
Resumes work on The Group after several years away from the manuscript. In October and November spends seven weeks in Tripoli at the villa of an Italian friend—“rather ideal” for work on the novel. Receives second Guggenheim Fellowship as well as proposal from State Department for lecture tour of Eastern European countries. The Stones of Florence is published in October. Arrives in Warsaw in December, where she meets James West, a U.S. Embassy public affairs officer (born 1914 in Old Town, Maine; West is married with three young children).
1960
Lectures on “Characters in Fiction” and “The Fact in Fiction.” The tour takes McCarthy, as well as Saul Bellow, to Poland and Yugoslavia. She continues with speaking engagements in Britain. Arranges rendezvous with West in Paris in March before flying home to New York to collect her possessions. Reuel graduates from Harvard. Returns to Europe and takes apartment in Rome, “with many trips to meet Jim—Zurich, Vienna, France, Copenhagen, even Warsaw—till September or October.” Turns the two lectures on fiction into pieces for On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961, which is published the following autumn by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. Joins West in Warsaw in October to live “under cover (more or less), like a captive in hideous hotel room with Party emblems on bedspreads, curtains. Hardly went out, and when did tried to lose self in faceless crowd. Under these nervous conditions, started work on Group again.” Goes to Paris on December 1.
1961
Divorced from Broadwater, in Alabama, on February 14; marries West, just divorced from his wife, in Paris on April 15. Embassy will not allow her to join him at his post in Warsaw until the former Mrs. West departs the city. Suffers slipped disk while waiting in Vienna and spends three weeks in clinic there. Arrives in Warsaw in a wheelchair and is “cured by Polish doctor.” Summer in Bocca di Magra, Italy. McCarthy and West spend his fall home leave from the State Department in Stonington, Connecticut. Interviewed for The Paris Review “Writers at Work” series by Elisabeth Niebuhr (later Sifton).
1962
After more time in Stonington, as well as Washington, West is made director of information for the new Office of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris. The couple arrive there in March and buy the apartment on the rue de Rennes where they will live for the next quarter century. McCarthy extravagantly praises Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire in The New Republic in June. The Wests summer in Bocca di Magra.
1963
The Group, published in August, becomes a major best seller. McCarthy finds the sales “stupefying.” The novel is reviewed negatively in The New York Review of Books by Norman Mailer (who nevertheless calls McCarthy “our saint, our umpire, our lit arbiter, our broadsword”), and parodied in the same journal by McCarthy’s friend Elizabeth Hardwick, writing under the name “Xavier Prynne.” Charles Feldman options the film rights for $162,500.
1964
“The Hue and Cry,” McCarthy’s defense of Hannah Arendt against attacks on Eichmann in Jerusalem, appears in Partisan Review. Lectures on Shakespeare in California. The Wests spend Jim’s summer home leave in Stonington, Connecticut, with his children. Begins Birds of America.
1966
Film of The Group, produced by Feldman, directed by Sidney Lumet, and with a cast including Candice Bergman, Joan Hackett, and Elizabeth Hartman, premieres in March. Brother Sheridan dies in October.
1967
Travels to South Vietnam in February to report on the war for The New York Review of Books. Doris Grumbach publishes a biography of McCarthy in late spring (The Company She Kept), much to the displeasure of its subject, who regrets her candid cooperation. McCarthy and West buy a house in Castine, Maine; they begin spending summers there—often in the company of Lowell, Hardwick, and poet Philip Booth—while continuing to live the rest of the year in Paris.
1968
A second trip to Vietnam in March, this time to the North, results in the publication of Hanoi, the second of three short volumes about the war.
1971
Birds of America published in summer, her first novel since The Group. Noting its extensive considerations of politics, ethics, nature, and the environment, Helen Vendler, in The New York Times Book Review, calls it a “fictional essay.” In August, covers the war-crimes trial of Captain Ernest Medina at Fort McPherson, Georgia, for The New Yorker.
1972
Medina appears in book form. Edmund Wilson dies June 12. Considers and abandons a plan to have fellow intellectuals, politicians, and other figures travel to Hanoi during the “Christmas bombing” campaign conducted by the Nixon administration.
1973
In June, covers the U.S. Senate’s Watergate hearings, chaired by North Carolina’s Sam Ervin, for the London Observer.
1974
In February, pays tribute to Philip Rahv, who died the year before, in The New York Times Book Review. The Mask of State, a collection of her Watergate reporting dedicated to Senator Ervin, published in the summer. The Seventeenth Degree, collecting three volumes about the Vietnam War, also published.
1975
Hannah Arendt dies, in New York, on December 4. In McCarthy’s obituary for Arendt, she writes: “Hannah is the only person I have ever watched think.”
1976
Edits Arendt’s last work, The Life of the Mind, while also composing what will be her own last novel, Cannibals and Missionaries.
1979
Cannibals and Missionaries is published in October. During her publicity tour for the novel, McCarthy records interview with Dick Cavett and remarks of playwright Lillian Hellman that “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ ” McCarthy had long been repelled by Hellman’s Stalinism and mendacious memoirs.
1980
Hellman sues McCarthy for $2.25 million for libel once the Cavett interview airs in January. Gives the Northcliffe Lectures at the University of London; they are published in October as Ideas and the Novel.
1982
Returns to Vassar in February as the President’s Distinguished Visitor.
1984
Awarded the National Medal for Literature at the New York Public Library on May 3. Hellman’s death on June 30 leads to the dropping of the lawsuit by the executors of her estate. The litigation had been expensive and stressful for McCarthy, who on July 16 is operated on, successfully, for water on the brain. On August 26 she receives the Edward MacDowell Medal for significant contribution to American culture.
1985
Occasional Prose, a collection of McCarthy’s critical writing, published in May. Her papers are acquired by the Vassar College library.
1986
Returns, after nearly forty years, to teaching at Bard College, on the Charles Stevenson Chair of Literature.
1987
How I Grew, a memoir of her early years, is published in the spring.
1988
Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and inducted in May. Carol Gelderman’s biography, Mary McCarthy: A Life, is published in August.
1989
Works on Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936–1938, which will be published posthumously. Dies in New York Hospital on October 25 of lung cancer; buried in Castine, Maine.