Mary McCarthy

1912 - 1989  (77 years)

• Name	Mary McCarthy
  Birth	21 Jun 1912	Seattle, King, Washington   [1]
  Gender	Female
  Death	25 Oct 1989	New York, New York
  Person ID	I42232	Ancestry of PNH, TNH, and others
  Last Modified	1 Aug 2025

  
  

  Father	Roy Winfield McCarthy   d. 1918, Seattle, King, Washington
  Mother	Martha Therese Preston   d. 1918, Seattle, King, Washington
  Family ID	F24708	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

  Family	Edmund Wilson,   b. 8 May 1895, Red Bank, Monmouth, New Jersey d. 12 Jun 1972, Talcotville, Lewis, New York (Age 77 years)
  Marriage	10 Feb 1938  [2]
  Divorce	Bef 10 Dec 1946	Nevada   [2]
  Family ID	F24706	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	1 Aug 2025

  
  

• Notes

  Novelist, critic, and political activist, best known for her novel The Group. Before her marriage to Edmund Wilson, she was married to Harold Johnsrud; afterwards, to Bowden Broadwater and then James West. She was orphaned at age six when both of her parents died in the 1918 flu epidemic. She was a prominent opponent of the Vietnam war, visiting North Vietnam in March 1968. She pursued a multi-decade feud with Lillian Hellman over Hellman's unabashed Stalinism, beginning with Hellman's insistence that the defendants in the Moscow purge trials were all guilty as charged. Memorably, in 1979, McCarthy remarked on the Dick Cavett show that "every word [Hellman] writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'." Her brother Kevin McCarthy (1914-2010) is best known as the male lead in the 1956 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The McCarthys were distantly related to Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota.

  
  

• Sources

  [S8142] Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & 30s ed. Lewis M. Dabney. New York: Library of America, 2007., year only. [S8142] Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & 30s ed. Lewis M. Dabney. New York: Library of America, 2007.