McCarthy, Mary (1912 - 1989)

Genre: General Fiction, Non-Fiction, Non-Fiction - Scholarly, Short Stories

Mary McCarthy was born in 1912 in Seattle, WA. She graduated from Vassar College in 1933; after graduation she taught briefly at Bard and Sarah Lawrence. She made her home in Paris and Castine, ME. Mary McCarthy died of lung cancer at New York Hospital on October 25, 1989. She is buried in Castine Cemetery in Castine, Maine

She worked in New York as an editor at The Nation and The New Republic, and as theater critic for the leftist political and intellectual journal Partisan Review.

McCarthy won several literary awards: the Horizon prize (1949), two Guggenheim fellowships (1949-50 and 1959-60), the MacDowell Medal for Literature and the National Medal for Literature (1984).

She was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy in Rome. She received honorary degrees from several colleges and universities, including Bowdoin, Colby, and the University of Maine at Orono.