玛丽·麦卡锡

玛丽·特蕾西·麦卡锡（1912年6月21日 - 1989年10月25日）是一位美国小说家、评论家和政治活动家。 麦卡锡于1949年和1959年两次获得古根海姆奖。 她也是美国艺术暨文学学会和罗马美国学院的成员。 1973年，她被评为美国文理科学院院士。 麦卡锡拥有巴德学院、鲍登学院、科尔比学院、史密斯学院、雪城大学、缅因大学、阿伯丁大学和赫尔大学的荣誉学位。

她与丽莲·海尔曼因为对莫斯科审判意见分歧而反目。她认为被告无辜，而海尔曼无条件的支持约瑟夫·斯大林提出的指控。两人的争论成为诺拉·艾芙伦创作的舞台剧《想像的朋友》的题材。

反对越南战争

1967年和1968年，麦卡锡前往北越和越南共和国。

她后来表示，没有任何证据显示越共故意杀害越南共和国妇女或儿童。 她对越共给予了高度评价。

麦卡锡访问越南引发争议。在她访问北越期间，她曾短暂会见了被北越俘虏的美国空军军官詹姆斯·里斯纳。多年后，里斯纳获释，他指责麦卡锡没有意识到他在被北越俘虏期间遭受了酷刑。

Mary Therese McCarthy (June 21, 1912 – October 25, 1989) was an American novelist, critic and political activist, best known for her novel The Group, her marriage to critic Edmund Wilson, her intimate friendship with her colleague Hannah Arendt and her storied feud with playwright Lillian Hellman. McCarthy was the winner of the Horizon Prize in 1949 and was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships, in 1949 and 1959. She was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome. In 1973, she delivered the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, the Netherlands, under the title Can There Be a Gothic Literature? The same year she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She won the National Medal for Literature and the Edward MacDowell Medal in 1984. McCarthy held honorary degrees from Bard, Bowdoin, Colby, Smith College, Syracuse University, the University of Maine at Orono, the University of Aberdeen, and the University of Hull.

Early life and education

Born on June 21, 1912 in Seattle, Washington to Roy Winfield McCarthy and his wife Martha Therese (née Preston), McCarthy and her three brothers were orphaned when both their parents died in the flu epidemic of 1918. She and her brothers, Kevin, Preston and Sheridan, were raised in very unhappy circumstances by her father's Irish Catholic parents in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and under the direct care of an uncle and aunt, whom she remembered for harsh treatment and abuse.

When the situation became intolerable, McCarthy was taken in by her maternal grandparents in Seattle. Her maternal grandmother, Augusta Morganstern, was Jewish, and her maternal grandfather, Harold Preston, a prominent attorney and co-founder of the law firm Preston Gates & Ellis, was Presbyterian. Her brothers were sent to boarding school.

McCarthy credited her grandfather, who helped draft one of the nation's first Workmen's Compensation Acts, with helping form her liberal views. McCarthy explores the complex events of her early life in Minneapolis and her coming-of-age in Seattle in her memoirs, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood and How I Grew. Her younger brother, Kevin McCarthy, became an actor and starred in motion pictures Death of a Salesman (1951) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

Under the guardianship of the Prestons, McCarthy studied at the Convent of the Sacred Heart - Forest Ridge in Seattle and Annie Wright Seminary in Tacoma. She attended Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she graduated in 1933 with an Bachelor of Arts cum laude and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

Career and public life

McCarthy's debut novel, The Company She Keeps, received critical acclaim as a succès de scandale, depicting the social milieu of New York intellectuals of the late 1930s with unreserved frankness. It includes her celebrated short story "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt" which Partisan Review published in 1941. It recounts the sexual encounter of a young bohemian intellectual woman and a middle-aged businessman encountered in the club car of a train. Although she finds him fat and grey, she is intrigued by his elegant Brooks Brothers shirts and his knowledge of literary figures. The story depicts—shockingly for the literary fiction of the era—not only the act of a woman choosing to engage in casual sex with a complete stranger but, more importantly, how that act is rooted in the complexity of her character.

After building a reputation as a satirist and critic, McCarthy enjoyed popular success when the 1963 edition of her novel The Group remained on the New York Times Best Seller list for almost two years. Her work is noted for its precise prose and its complex mixture of autobiography and fiction.

Randall Jarrell's 1954 novel Pictures from an Institution is said to be about McCarthy's year teaching at Sarah Lawrence.