Seeing Mary Plain

"Beautiful, reckless, and endlessly maddening, Mary McCarthy never failed to leave an impression. From her Partisan Review days as the embattled "dark lady of American letters" to her stormy marriage to critic Edmund Wilson, from her huge but controversial success with her best-selling novel The Group to her epic libel battle with Lillian Hellman, she brought an almost nineteenth-century scope and drama to her emblematic twentieth-century life.". "Here is a biography that does full justice to one of the most controversial American intellectuals of this century. Frances Kiernan has interviewed dozens of McCarthy's friends, former lovers, literary and political comrades-in-arms, awestruck admirers, amused observers, and bitter adversaries to produce a work rich in ironic judgment, delicious gossip, and eloquent testimony."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.