For the first time in a deluxe collector's edition, all seven 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. In McCarthy's most famous novel, The Group
(1963), she depicts the lives of eight Vassar College graduates during
the 1930s as they grapple with sex, sexism, money, motherhood, and
family. McCarthy's final two novels--Birds of America (1971), a coming
of age tale of 19-year-old Peter Levi, who travels to Europe during the
1960s, and Cannibals and Missionaries (1979), a thriller about a group
of passengers taken hostage on an airplane by militant hijackers--are
both concerned with the state of modern society, from the cross-currents
of radical social change to the psychology of terrorism. 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. As
a special feature, the second volume contains McCarthy's 1979 essay The
Novels that Got Away, on her unfinished fiction.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization
founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by
publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most
significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than
300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in
length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are
printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
