Mary McCarthy (1912-1989) was a novelist, essayist, and critic. Her political and social commentary, literary essays, and drama criticism appeared in magazines such as Partisan Review, The New Yorker, Harper's, and The New York Review of Books, and were collected in On the Contrary (1961), Mary McCarthy's Theatre Chronicles 1937-1962 (1963), The Writing on the Wall (1970), Ideas and the Novel (1980), and Occasional Prose (1985). Her novels include The Company She Keeps (1942), The Oasis (1949), The Groves of Academe (1952), A Charmed Life (1955), The Group (1963), Birds of America (1971), and Cannibals and Missionaries (1979). She was the author of three works of autobiography, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), How I Grew (1987), and the unfinished Intellectual Memoirs (1992), and two travel books about Italy, Venice Observed (1956) and The Stones of Florence (1959). Her essays on the Vietnam War were collected in The Seventeenth Degree (1974); her essays on Watergate were collected in The Mask of State (1974). »

A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays

By Mary McCarthy
Edited and with an introduction by A.O. Scott

Mary McCarthy was one of the leading literary figures of her time. In addition to the novels and memoirs for which she is best remembered, she was also a tireless literary and social critic. Starting out as a theater reviewer for Partisan Review in 1937, she quickly distinguished herself for her witty and fearless commentary on topics ranging from McCarthyism to the French New Novel to women's fashion magazines. McCarthy was an eager controversialist, unsparing in her dissection of anything she found phony or hypocritical. Her reviews are sharp, sometimes malicious, and often very funny, but her criticism is also informed by deep erudition and enlivened by an inexhaustible capacity for enthusiasm. Her political writings, critical in equal measure of the Cold War consensus and of its critics, are less concerned with finding correct positions than with exploring the often-absurd circumstances in which agonizing moral decisions are made. While the soundness of McCarthy's judgments can sometimes be doubted, her curiosity and intelligence cannot.

The intellectual brio and acute judgment that characterizes her best fiction is vividly displayed in this selection of essays, which span McCarthy's career from the late 1930s to the late 1970s. It includes her writings on topics such as fashion magazines, Eugene O'Neill, "A Streetcar Named Desire," "Look Back in Anger," Pale Fire, J. D. Salinger, Madame Bovary, Italo Calvino, and Watergate.

Reviews

From Portugal to the Watergate Hotel, Mary McCarthy covers astounding territory in her incomparable way.
— Vogue

A Bolt from the Blue distills a half century of McCarthy's nonfiction.... Readers of this new collection will take immense pleasure in McCarthy's high-speed aphorisms, flawless taxonomies, and chains of reasoning.... McCarthy has been lucky in Scott, who put together this collection of her work with real intelligence and enthusiasm.
— Thomas Mallon, The Atlantic Monthly

To reread the essays is to be reminded of a singular virtue of all her writing.... She knew that to hits its target, a description must be clean, precise and aimed with aggression. She reveled in her unabashed willingness to commence hostilities.
— Judith Shulevitz, The New York Times Book Review

Mary McCarthy casts a cold eye on the mundane, the lazy mind, the tribal response, and bad prose. Personal inclination and moral assertion clash in these witty and learned encounters with life and art. A dazzling talent.
— Elizabeth Hardwick

Fierce, provocative, and lovely, a collection of small masterpieces, by one of the twentieth century’s most dazzling minds.
— Katie Roiphe

Also see:

Unknown Masterpieces Edited by Edwin Frank In this original collection, several of today's finest writers introduce little-known treasures of literature that they count among their favorite books.

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