Flint Public Library (Middleton)

Novels & stories 1942-1963, The company she keeps ; The oasis ; The groves of academe ; A charmed life ; Stories, Mary McCarthy ; Thomas Mallon, editor

eng

Includes bibliographical references

no index present

fiction

Novels & stories 1942-1963

bibliography

952647443

Mary McCarthy ; Thomas Mallon, editor

The Library of America, 290

The company she keeps ; The oasis ; The groves of academe ; A charmed life ; Stories

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. 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 timeThe company she keeps: The experiences of a young bohemian intellectual in New York City. The six episodes create a fascinating portrait of a New York social circle of the 1930sThe oasis: A group of Americans who seek to escape the perils of present-day life by going to the New England mountainsThe groves of academe: Henry Mulcahy, a literature instructor at progressive Jocelyn College, is informed that his appointment will not be continued. Convinced he is disliked by the president of Jocelyn because of his abilities as a teacher and his independence of mass opinion, Mulcahy believes he is being made the victim of a witch-hunt. Plotting vengeance, Mulcahy battles to fight for justice and, in the process, reveals his true ethical natureA charmed life: Martha Sinnott returns with her second husband to the New England artists' colony she left behind seven years earlier when she divorced her first husband. The town folk have remained much the same, including Martha's former husband, who has relocated nearby

Novels and stories 1942-1963Mary McCarthy, novels & stories 1942-1963Company she keepsOasisGroves of academeCharmed lifeStories