Beautiful and reckless, supremely quick and endlessly maddening, Mary McCarthy (1912-1989) never failed to leave an impression. From her Partisan Review days as the embattled "Dark Lady of American letters" to her stormy marriage to (and even stormier divorce from) critic Edmund Wilson to her huge but ambiguous success with her best-selling novel The Group to her epic libel battle with Lillian Hellman, she brought an almost nineteenth-century scope and drama to her emblematic twentieth-century life. Time called her "quite possibly the cleverest woman America has ever produced," and she moved in a circle of the most intellectually combative and sharpest-tongued Americans of this century -- all of whom had plenty to say (some of it complimentary, some distinctly not) about this vibrant woman in their midst. People are still talking, and Fran Kiernan has interviewed dozens of good friends, former lovers, literary and political comrades-in-arms, awestruck admirers, amused observers, and bitter adversaries -- to produce a biography rich in delicious gossip, ironic judgment, and eloquent testimony.
