Guide to the Mary McCarthy Papers,
1925–1990 (bulk 1960-1989)
Table of Contents
- Collection Summary
- Biographical Note
- Scope and Content Note
- Subject Headings
- Administrative Information
- Access and Use
- Encoding Information
- Series Descriptions
- Series and Subseries List
- Container List
Collection Summary
| Repository: | Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Libraries |
|---|---|
| Creator: | McCarthy, Mary, 1912-1989 |
| Title: | Mary McCarthy Papers |
| Dates: | 1925–1990 |
| Dates: | 1960-1989 |
| Quantity: | 89 cubic ft (393 boxes) |
| Abstract: | |
| Forms of Materials: | Correspondence, manuscripts, photographs, clippings, scrapbooks, and realia. |
Biographical Note
The only daughter of Roy Winfield and Therese ("Tess") Preston McCarthy, Mary Therese McCarthy was born on 21 June 1912 in Seattle, Washington. Following Mary came three brothers: Kevin, Preston, and Sheridan.
En route to a new home in Minneapolis, purchased for the family by her paternal grandparents, the McCarthy children (ages 6, 4, 3, and 1) were orphaned when their parents became victims of the influenza epidemic of 1918. The children were taken in by their great-aunt Margaret Sheridan McCarthy and her new husband, Myers Shriver and subjected to a horrible life depicted in McCarthy's work, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957). After six years with the Shrivers, Mary was taken back to Seattle to live with her maternal grandparents, Harold and Augusta Morganstern Preston; her brothers were sent to boarding school. Mary moved in with her grandparents in their upper-class home and enjoyed a life of luxury. Harold, a well-known and successful attorney, and "Gussie," known for her beauty and elegance, wanted Mary to have an excellent education and enrolled her in a convent school for her primary education and then in the Annie Wright Seminary for high school. From there she went on to Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, and graduated, Phi Beta Kappa, with her bachelor's degree in 1933.
Following commencement McCarthy moved to New York City and married Harold Johnsrud, an aspiring playwright, the first of her four husbands. They divorced in 1936 and early in 1937, she began a job as an editorial assistant for the publishing house of Covici-Friede.
By spring 1937, Mary had become involved with Philip Rahv. Together they revived a literary journal known as Partisan Review, which had been founded in 1934 by Rahv and William Phillips. Mary served on the editorial board along with Dwight Macdonald, F. W. Dupee, and others. She served as drama critic as well. During that period of time, she also had book reviews published in The New Republic and The Nation.
Through her association with Partisan Review, McCarthy became acquainted with Edmund Wilson, a well-known literary critic, whom she married in 1938. With Wilson Mary had her only child, a son named Reuel. McCarthy's first book, The Company She Keeps, was published in 1942.
Following their divorce in 1945, McCarthy accepted a teaching position for a year at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, not far north of Vassar. During that time she met a member of the staff of The New Yorker, Bowden Broadwater, whom she married in 1946. Much later in her life, McCarthy returned to teach one semester a year at Bard College, as the Charles Stevenson Professor of Literature, between 1986 and her death in 1989. For a semester in 1948, Mary taught English at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. During her marriage to Broadwater, McCarthy was very prolific in her writing, publishing eight books between 1949 and 1961. She also contributed numerous articles to such periodicals as Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and Harper's, as well as Partisan Review.
While on a lecture tour in Poland for the United States Information Agency in late 1959 and early 1960, accompanied by Broadwater and Reuel, McCarthy met and fell in love with James West. As the Public Affairs Officer for the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw and director of the embassy's branch of the U.S.I.A., West planned their itinerary for the four weeks they spent in Poland. Following their respective divorces in 1960 and 1961, McCarthy and West were married in April 1961.
The Wests maintained two homes, an apartment in Paris and a house in Castine, Maine, and delighted in a busy social life together. On 25 October 1989, McCarthy died of cancer at New York Hospital. At the time of her death, she was working on the second volume of her autobiography, published posthumously in 1992 as Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936-1938.
Mary McCarthy was the author of twenty-eight books during her lifetime, both fiction and non-fiction. Many of these works comprised chapters that had previously appeared in periodicals; two were texts of lectures that she had given. Her novels were partially autobiographical, and many times, her characters in whole or in part, were based on her acquaintances. Irvin Stock, a critic whom McCarthy admired, has said of her novels that "each has so much life and truth, and is written in a prose so spare, vigorous, and natural ... yet at the same time [is] so witty, graceful, and, in a certain way, poetic...."
The breadth of her writing is wide, from drama reviews to the history of art and architecture, from cultural criticism to political analysis and travel observations. She was known for her keen intellect, her wit and courage, and her literary style that was precise, but graceful. From her readers and reviewers, she elicited strong reactions that were frequently negative. She was often referred to as the "lady with a switchblade." Wendy Martin, in Modern American Women Writers (1991), said: "McCarthy was a survivor rather than a victim; she was unequivocally a writer of extraordinary range and a citizen of the world."
McCarthy won a number of literary awards, among them the Horizon prize (1949) and two Guggenheim fellowships (1949-50 and 1959-60). Both the MacDowell Medal for Literature and the National Medal for Literature, were bestowed upon her in 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 Bard, Bowdoin, Colby, and Smith Colleges, Syracuse University, and from the Universities of Aberdeen, Hull, and Maine at Orono.
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Scope and Content Note
Includes manuscripts of works by McCarthy, correspondence with agents and publishers, correspondence with publications like the New Yorker and New York Review of Books; and files on a variety of issues such as dissidents, Spanish Refugee Aid and the Veitnam War. There is also extensive correspondence with friends, family members and other literary figures like Carmen Angleton, Hannah Arendt, Nicola Chiaromonte, Elizabeth Hardwick, Lotte Kohler, Dwight Macdonald, Cees Nooteboom, Philip Rahv, Arthur Schlesinger, Stephen Spender and Niccoló Tucci. Among the legal papers are items on Lillian Hellman. There are some photos and videotapes of McCarthy as well.
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Access and Use
Access
The correspondence to Carmen Angleton is closed to researchers until January 2010 and boxes 256-257, 260-263, and 264-276 are closed to researchers. The rest of the collection is open for research according to the regulations of the Vassar College Archives and Special Collections Library without any additional restrictions.
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Subject Headings
Names:
- Arendt, Hannah.
- Booteboom, Cees, 1933-
- Broadwater, Bowden.
- Chiaromonte, Nicola.
- Hardwick, Elizabeth.
- Hellman, Lillian, 1906-
- Köhler, Lotte.
- Macdonald, Dwight.
- Rahv, Philip, 1908-1973.
- Schlesinger, Arthur Meier, 1917.
- Spender, Stephen, 1909-
- Swertka, Eve.
- Tucci, Niccoló, 1908-
- Viscusi, Margo.
- West family.
- Wilson, Edmund, 1895-1972.
- Wilson, Reuel K., 1938-
Organizations:
- A.M. Hearth & Company.
- Brandt & Brandt.
- Harcourt, Brace & Javonovich.
- New York Review of Books.
- New Yorker.
- Spanish Refugee Aid (Organization).
Subjects:
- Critics.
- Dissenters -- Europe.
- Literary agents.
- Novelists.
- Politics and literature -- United States - 20th century.
- Publishers and publishing.
- Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975.
Document Types:
- Photoprints.
- Scrapbooks.
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Encoding Information
Encoded by Elizabeth Clarke, June 2007.
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Administrative Information
Preferred Citation
Mary McCarthy Papers, Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Libraries.
Processing Information
Original processing date unknown. Updated June 2007.
Acquisition Information
The bulk of the collection was acquired by purchase from Mary McCarthy in 1983 and 1985. Additional accessions were added before and after her death, the largest arriving in 2001. Other materials have been been acquired through purchase as well as gift.
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Series Descriptions
Series I. Writings ca. 1925-1992 bulk 1942-1979 (Boxes 1-97, 316-331) |
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| This series is broken down into a number of subseries: McCarthy Works (in chronological order); Unpublished Works by McCarthy (in alphabetical order); Notes and Notebooks of McCarthy; Contributions to Others' Works by McCarthy (in chronological order and for larger amounts of material in alphabetical order by authors' names); Books about McCarthy (in chronological order); Other Works about McCarthy (generally articles about McCarthy, arranged in alphabetical order according to authors' names); and finally, Works by and about Others (in alphabetical order according to the authors' names). | |
| The series includes McCarthy's manuscripts and typescripts, many of which are heavily revised, as well as setting copies, galleys, and page proofs. Often her research notes and correspondence with her publishers are included along with dust jacket dummies, reviews, and readers' mail. As sometimes happened, McCarthy's articles previously published in magazines later became chapters in her books. Hence, the material relating to the article is placed with the material for the respective book, in the order in which each chapter appeared in the book. The material for each of her books is in chronological order according to the publishing date the book was published. Following the material for Intellectual Memoirs (1992), are McCarthy's published articles that did not appear in any of her books. This material may include the actual printed article, drafts, proofs, or even notes and sometimes correspondence relating to the article. | |
| Included in the subseries of books about McCarthy, there is correspondence between McCarthy and Doris Grumbach, Sherlie Evens Goldman, Carol Gelderman, and Carol Brightman as well as other material relating to Grumbach's book, The Company She Kept (1967). |
Series II. Publishing Files, 1940-1989 bulk 1960s-1980s (Boxes 98-129, 331-335) |
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| Included in this series is correspondence between McCarthy and her agents, the publishers for both her books and articles (foreign and domestic), and her photographers and translators. There are also publishing and broadcasting contracts, as well as material relating to her copyrights and royalties. Additionally, there are four boxes of letters from authors and publishers requesting permission to publish quotations from her works, often accompanied with copies of McCarthy's replies to them. | |
| There is frequently an overlap of documentation in series I and II as one will often find correspondence relating to specific McCarthy works in both series. This is especially true in the correspondence between McCarthy and her major publisher, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Included in the Harcourt Brace correspondence are the letters (often with McCarthy's replies) from William Jovanovich, documenting a friendship that grew and flourished until McCarthy's death. |
Series III. Professional Files, 1938-1989 bulk 1965-1985 (Boxes 130-173, 336-340) |
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| The documentation in this series includes everything relating to McCarthy's professional career other than that relating to her publishing. There are requests for McCarthy to be interviewed, to speak, to serve on literary panels and juries, and many requests to write articles or chapters for books. Following the subseries on requests for interviews are interview texts and transcripts. Also included in this series is the material pertaining to the various awards and honorary degrees that McCarthy received. There are miscellaneous requests ranging from asking for her favorite dessert recipe to seeking her advice on how to have something published. The material includes correspondence, programs, and clippings. | |
| Included in this series is a good deal of correspondence, both pro and con, received from McCarthy's readers. Although there is some readers' correspondence in series I with some of Mary's writings, letters from readers appear mainly in this series in chronological order. Mail received from students appears following McCarthy's readers' correspondence. | |
| There is a small amount of material, mainly correspondence, from McCarthy's part-time secretarial help. However, McCarthy developed a long and enduring friendship with Margo Viscusi, who was a part-time secretary for Mary during the 1960s. The correspondence with Mrs. Viscusi is located in Series V. |
Series IV. Professional/Personal Interest Subject Files, 1947-1988 (Boxes 174-179, 341) |
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| The files in this series were originally created by McCarthy andhave been retained in their original order. The material includes mainly correspondence and clippings pertaining to projects or activities in which McCarthy took an interest, sometimes in the role of activist. Here also are files on two short-lived periodicals: Critic (1952), a project undertaken by some of the people involved with McCarthy in the Europe-America Groups; and Dwight Macdonald's politics (1947). The most extensive of these files are those on Vietnam, which include not only correspondence (including some from McCarthy to the families of POWs in Vietnam) and a large number of clippings, but also pamphlets, unofficial translations of statements of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and official statements of the U.S. and French governments; as well as documents from the Paris Peace Negotiations. |
Series V. Personal/Biographical Files, 1929-1990 bulk 1965-1988 (Boxes 180-256, 342-366) |
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| This series documents the personal elements of Mary McCarthy's life and contains mainly personal correspondence received from McCarthy's close friends, acquaintances, and family. Incoming and outgoing mail are housed together as they were kept in Mary's files. The correspondence covers a wide range of subjects, but is frequently literary in nature. Many of McCarthy's friends were writers themselves, and there are frequent references to their own work as well as to the work of others. The earliest letter included is from her maternal grandmother, Augusta Morganstern Preston, written to Mary while she was still attending Vassar in 1932. | |
| The series is broken down into personal correspondence to and from Mary McCarthy; and family correspondence. The family correspondence is further divided into correspondence from Bowden Broadwater, McCarthy's third husband; the McCarthy and Preston Families; the West Family; and the Wilson Family. Correspondence between Mary and Reuel Wilson is closed until 2 March 2000. Occasionally, one will find in this series correspondence that was really more concerned with McCarthy's works, such as the correspondence from critic Irvin Stock; however, the letters in this series had been filed in the personal correspondence in accordance with Mary's wishes and have, therefore, been left in the original order. | |
| The series of letters between McCarthy and Hannah Arendt is particularly interesting and illuminates the strong bond that developed between the two women. This is true also for the correspondence that flowed between Mary and Elizabeth Hardwick, one of McCarthy's dearest friends. Other personal files in this series include McCarthy's calendars, datebooks, and address books; and her record of entertainment with names of guests at her dinner parties and sometimes menus as well. There is also information about her marriage to James West in June 1961; her 60th birthday, and the memorial tributes held at The Pierpont Morgan Library (New York, November 1989) and at Vassar College (Poughkeepsie, May 1990). | |
| McCarthy's medical files, also included in this series, are closed until 2 March 2000. |
Series VI. Legal/Financial Material — Personal and Professional) (Boxes 257-276, 367-385) |
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| This material is temporarily closed until final processing is completed. The tax material included in this series is closed until 2 March 2000. |
Series VII. Photographs, 1911-1980s (Boxes 277-293, 386-387) |
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| Within this series is a subseries on Mary McCarthy, arranged chronologically. Many of the photographs included were taken for dust jackets for Mary's works. However, there are also informal photographs, some of which were taken by Hannah Arendt and Mary's brother, Kevin. The subsequent subseries are arranged according to the various families in Mary's life (Preston, McCarthy, Wilson, West), and there are some of Bowden Broadwater and one of Harold Johnsrud, Mary's first husband. There are additional subseries relating to McCarthy's friends, various places and events, and Mary and Jim West's homes in Paris and Castine. Also included are two photograph albums, one created by Mary with many informal photographs of Reuel and a few of Edmund Wilson, Macdonald, Broadwater, Chiaromonte and others taken in the 1940s and 1950s. The photo album of Roy McCarthy, Mary's father, contains many photographs of the McCarthy family before Tess and Roy were married and before their deaths when their children were still infants and toddlers. |
Series VIII. Video and Audiotapes, 1960-1989 (Boxes 294-295, 388) |
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| The videotapes include the Moyers-Hellman interview, July 1984, and five different appearances of McCarthy on various BBC television programs between 1960 and 1968. The audiotapes include interviews of Mary McCarthy by Doris Grumbach in Paris, January 1966 and by Radioscopie in June 1972. McCarthy's lecture "Hannah Arendt Recollected," given at The University, Southampton's Hannah Arendt Memorial Lecture (March 1980) is also on audiotape along with one of McCarthy's Memorial Service in November 1989 at The Pierpont Morgan Library. |
Series IX. Scrapbooks (Boxes 296-298) |
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| The three scrapbooks in this series include one created by McCarthy's great-grandfather, Civil War Brigadier General Simon Manly Preston. It is a journal, with Simon's handwritten, partial autobiography, and also includes clippings, letters, and photographs pertaining to Simon Preston and his family. The other two scrapbooks include reviews of McCarthy's Venice Observed (1956) and On the Contrary (1961); and various clippings about Mary and Kevin McCarthy (1967-1970). |
Series X. Clippings (Boxes 299-315, 389-390) |
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| The clippings cover a variety of subjects, but mainly of reviews of McCarthy's works and about McCarthy in general. They also include clippings relating to her family, friends, and acquaintances and events and activities in which McCarthy took an interest. |
Series XI. Artifacts and Ephemera (Boxes 391-393 and mapcases) |
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Series and Subseries List
Series I. Writings |
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| Juvenelia | |
| Published Books | |
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| Journal Articles by McCarthy | |
| Unpublished Works by McCarthy | |
| Notes and Notebooks of McCarthy | |
| Contributions to Others' Works by McCarthy | |
| Books About McCarthy | |
| Other Works about McCarthy | |
| Works by and about Others |
Series II. Publishing Files |
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| Agents' Correspondence | |
| American Publishers' Correspondence | |
| Foreign Publishers' Correspondence | |
| Publishers' Correspondence: Magazines and Newspapers | |
| Photographers' and Translators' Correspondence | |
| Publishing/Broadcasting Contracts | |
| Copyrights | |
| Royalties | |
| Permissions |
Series III. Professional Files |
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| Requests to Interview | |
| Requests to Speak | |
| Requests for Panels and Juries | |
| Requests to Write | |
| Miscellaneous requests | |
| Professional Associations | |
| Reader's and Students' Mail | |
| Secretarial and Bookdealers' Correspondence | |
| Teaching Files | |
| Awards | |
| Honarary Degrees |
Series IV. Professional/Personal Interest Subject Files |
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Series V. Personal/Biographical Files |
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| Personal Correspondence to and from Mary McCarthy | |
| Family Correspondence: Broadwater, Bowden | |
| Family Correspondence: McCarthy and Preston Family | |
| Family Correspondence: West Family | |
| Family Correspondence: Wilson Family | |
| Correspondence Notebooks | |
| Personal Files | |
| Medical Records |
Series VI. Legal/Financial Material — Personal and Professional |
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| Legal Documents | |
| Hellman Lawsuit Material | |
| Financial Papers | |
| Tax Material |
Series VII. Photographs |
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| Mary McCarthy | |
| Preston and McCarthy Families | |
| Harold Johnsrud and Wilson Family | |
| Bowden Broadwater and West Family | |
| Friends and Acquaintances | |
| Residences | |
| Places and Events | |
| Miscellaneous/Unidentified People and Places | |
| Oversized Photographs | |
| Photograph Albums |
Series VIII. Video and Audiotapes |
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| Videotapes | |
| Audiotapes |
Series IX. Scrapbooks |
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Series X. Clippings |
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Series XI. Artifacts and Ephemera |
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