Over the years, Mary McCarthy has contributed articles to numerous magazines and papers, has published books of essays and short stories, and has produced six major novels. She has been the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships (1949, 1959), the
Horizon prize for 1949, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant for 1957. Thus honored and prolific, Mary McCarthy's fiction reflects her urbane, intellectual, sophisticated tastes and is marked by a highly comic, often satiric vision of life in post-World War II America. Nevertheless, critics of her work remain divided between those, like Harry T. Moore, who see her primarily as an essayist who "cares for ideas rather than people" and those who, like Irvin Stock, see her as a novelist with a vision which "moves us, which enlarges our sympathies, and which brings us close to complex reality." Neither group denies her importance in contemporary American writing, but each fails to resolve what exactly her contribution has been. That her work speaks to serious thinkers and writers is undeniable.
Coloring all of Mary McCarthy's work are the events of her childhood. The eldest of four children, she was born in Seattle, Washington, on 21 June 1912 to Therese Preston McCarthy and Roy Winfield McCarthy.
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