Critic and novelist Mary McCarthy, a leading woman of American letters known best for her biting observations of politics and literature, died Wednesday of cancer at age 77.
McCarthy first made her mark among the New York intellectuals of the 1930s centered on the "Partisan Review." She gained a wider audience in 1963 with her novel, "The Group."She was one of the first leftist writers to condemn Stalin in the '40s, and she wrote from Hanoi for the New York Review of Books during the Vietnam War.
McCarthy was born in Seattle in 1912 to Roy and Therese McCarthy. After they died in the 1918 flu epidemic, Mary and three younger brothers were entrusted to an aunt and uncle in Minneapolis. They forced them to live like paupers.
She recounted her sordid childhood in the 1957 "Memories of a Catholic Girlhood," considered a landmark in autobiographical writing, and in "How I Grew," published in 1987 as a sequel.
Her awards including membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, two Guggenheim fellowships, the National Medal for Literature and the Horizon Prize.
She was the owner of a "wholly destructive critical mind," possessed of an "unerring ability to spot the hidden weakness or inconsistency in any literary effort and every person," said writer Alfred Kazin.
She was married four times. Her second marriage, in 1938, was to the eminent critic Edmund Wilson. They had one son, Reuel. She is survived by her fourth husband, James West, and her son.
McCarthy moved to Paris in 1962 and divided her time between there and a home in Castine, Maine.