American Writers (One Hundred Pages at a Time)

The finale of my review of Mary McCarthy's THE GROUP. This is a must read novel if you want to know the philosophy behind second wave feminism and an overall great novel.

Part 2 of my review of Mary McCarthy's THE GROUP. A great novel of second-wave feminism and perhaps McCarthy's most well-known work. It is a profound look at the struggles professional women faced in the 1930s with spoke directly to the 1960s, when it was written.

Part one of my review of Mary McCarthy's THE GROUP. THE GROUP is a classic text of second-wave feminism in which a group of educated women deal with various social inequalities. In this first part we meet the "Group" and talk about class, birth control, and sexual freedom.

In A CHARMED LIFE, Mary McCarthy explores intellectual bohemians and their quite odd lives. At the center of this story is an affair between a married woman and her domineering ex-husband. The tragedy comes when she finds she might be pregnant, but who is the father?

Mary McCarthy's A CHARMED LIFE is a pretty interesting story about suburbia, adultery, and in-typical McCarthy fashion-intellectuals and artists acting bizarrely. Worth a read.

The conclusion of my review of Mary McCarthy's THE GROVES OF ACADEME. Overall, a really fun novel about the delusional and petty world of academia that still has a contemporary feel. 

In THE GROVES OF ACADEME Mary McCarthy studies the insane world at a small liberal college. Like all of the other groups McCarthy studies, the whole is certainly less than the sum of its parts.

Onto the second Mary McCarthy novel in this episode. THE OASIS is about an intentional community of crazy intellectuals doing crazy, petty, and stupid stuff. Sounds like a university.

What a great novel! I finish my thoughts on Mary McCarthy's debut novel THE COMPANY SHE KEEPS in this episode. These chapters look at American Trotskyism and the psychological confessional.

We begin a new series looking into the early works of the brilliant Mary McCarthy. In this episode we begin with THE COMPANY SHE KEEPS, a novel of interconnected stories dealing with the contradictions in the life of a modern American woman.