Seeing Mary Plain

"Beautiful, reckless, and endlessly maddening, Mary McCarthy never failed to leave an impression. From her Partisan Review days as the embattled "dark lady of American letters" to her stormy marriage to critic Edmund Wilson, from her huge but controversial 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.". "Here is a biography that does full justice to one of the most controversial American intellectuals of this century. Frances Kiernan has interviewed…