![]() Her appeal for biographers derives partly from her beauty and glamour. So who is right? Her faithful readers or the university intellectuals she so mocked and derided in her essays and novels, and who have belatedly returned the (dis)favor? ![]() ![]() And there will surely be more accounts of her life both in print and, no doubt, on the screen. Still, there have been at least three full-length biographies of McCarthy, plus a son’s reminiscences, and a Broadway play about her contretemps with Hellman. Although a lifelong leftist, she is adjudged (if she is thought of by bien-pensant intellectuals at all) as a conceited, viperish figure who took delight in attacking such patron saints as Lillian Hellman. Nor does McCarthy have a partisan cheering section any longer, if she ever had one. ![]() Yet it is rarely assigned-or even well regarded-in colleges and while highly entertaining, The Group is not generally recognized as a classic, is not romantic, and is not a potboiler. The centenary of Mary McCarthy’s birth falls on this year’s summer solstice, and August is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of her most famous novel, The Group, which sold more than five million copies by the time of McCarthy’s death in 1989, and continues to sell. ![]()
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