Mary McCarthy: Novels 1963-1979 (LOA #291): The Group / Birds of America / Canni [Hardcover]

In the second volume of the definitive edition of her fiction, three novels by the witty and provocative writer who defined a generation, including the landmark classicThe Group.

In Mary McCarthy's most famous novel,The Group(1963), she depicts the lives of eight Vassar College graduates during the 1930s as they grapple with sex, sexism, money, motherhood, and family. McCarthy's final two novels--Birds of America (1971), a coming of age tale of 19-year-old Peter Levi, who travels to Europe during the 1960s, andCannibals and Missionaries(1979), a thriller about a group of passengers taken hostage on an airplane by militant hijackers--are both concerned with the state of modern society, from the cross-currents of radical social change to the psychology of terrorism. As a special feature, this second volume contains McCarthy's 1979 essay The Novels that Got Away, on her unfinished fiction.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.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 forThe New Republic,The Nation, and thePartisan 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 il“Ô