Mary McCarthy (1912-1989), novelist, critic, and political activist, was born in Seattle and orphaned at age six, thereafter raised by various relatives in Minnesota and Washington. She graduated from Vassar College in 1933 and went on to work as a critic for The New Republic, The Nation, and the Partisan Review, for which she was an editor from 1937 to 1948. She married four times, most notably in 1938 to the critic Edmund Wilson. She is the author of seven novels as well as many other volumes of autobiography, travelogues, essays, and criticism.

Thomas Mallon, editor, is the author of eight novels, including Watergate and Fellow Travelers, as well as seven books of nonfiction. He directs the creative writing program at The George Washington University, in Washington, D.C.

In the first volume of the definitive edition of her fiction, four novels and eight classic stories by the witty and provocative writer who defined a generation.

Seventy-five years ago Mary McCarthy provoked a scandal with her electrifying debut novel, The Company She Keeps (1942), announcing the arrival of a major new voice in American literature. A candid, thinly-veiled portrait of the late-1930s New York intellectual scene, its penetrating gaze and creative fusion of life and literature--"mutual plagiarism," she called it--became the hallmark of McCarthy's fiction, which the Library of America now presents in full for the first time in deluxe collector's edition. The Oasis (1949), a wicked satire about a failed utopian community, and The Groves of Academe (1952), a pioneering campus novel depicting the insular and often absurd world of academia, burnished her reputation as an acerbic truth-teller, but it was with A Charmed Life (1955), a searing story of small-town infidelity, that McCarthy fully embraced the frank and avant-garde treatment of gender and sexuality that would inspire generations of readers and writers. Also included are all eight of McCarthy's short stories, four from her collection Cast a Cold Eye (1950), and four collected here for the first time.