Violet brightman biography books

Mary McCarthy has played a remarkable and hugely controversial role in the intellectual life of our times.

More than any other American writer, she has made its core ideas and many of its secrets the subject of her fiction and criticism; yet neither the drama of her own life nor the precise nature of her literary achievement has been seriously considered until now.

Nor has McCarthy herself, in her memoirs, told the whole story. In this ground-breaking biography, Carol Brightman probes both the public and private reaches of McCarthy's career and re-creates the pivotal scenes in her development as a fiercely independent woman and writer.

With its recreation of life among the literati in New York, Wellfleet, Paris, Rome, and Castine, Maine, and lively portraits of fellow intellectuals, most notably Hannah Arendt, along with its renditions of the historic events that absorbed McCarthy's generation - the Moscow trials, McCarthyism and