Mary McCarthy: Novels & Stories 1942-1963 (LOA #290)

This first volume of the definitive edition of her fiction includes four novels and eight classic stories by the witty and provocative writer who defined a generation

In 1942, Mary McCarthy provoked a scandal with her electrifying debut novel, The Company She Keeps, 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.

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.