American critic and novelist whose fiction is noted for its wit and acerbity in analyzing the finer moral nuances of intellectual dilemmas.

McCarthy, whose family belonged to all three major American religious traditions—Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish—was left an orphan at age six. After her parents' deaths, she spent several unhappy years with strict relatives in Minnesota before going to live with her grandparents in Seattle, Wash., under conditions she found more pleasant. Her unhappiness with her orthodox Roman Catholic relatives in Minnesota did not erase her interest in Catholicism, which lasted long after she lost her faith. McCarthy was educated at private schools and at Vassar College (B.A., 1933). She then worked as a critic for The New Republic, the Nation, and the Partisan Review. She served on the editorial staff of the Partisan Review from 1937 to 1948. For that publication she wrote extensively on art, theatre, travel, and politics. She married four times, the second time, in 1938, to the noted American critic Edmund Wilson (Wilson, Edmund), who encouraged her to begin writing fiction.

As both a novelist and a critic McCarthy was noted for bitingly satiric commentaries on marriage, sexual expression, the impotence of intellectuals, and the role of women in contemporary urban America. Her first story, "Cruel and Barbarous Treatment," was published in the Southern Review in 1939. It later became the opening chapter of The Company She Keeps (1942), a loosely connected series of semiautobiographical stories concerning a fashionable woman who experiences divorce and psychoanalysis. The Oasis (1949; also published as Source of Embarrassment) is a short novel about the failure of a utopian community of ineffectually idealistic intellectuals. In The Groves of Academe (1952), McCarthy satirized American higher education during the Joseph McCarthy era. In 1956 and 1959 McCarthy experimented with lavishly photographed travelogues of Italy in Venice, Observed and The Stones of Florence. Her Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), which is autobiographical, was highly praised by critics. It was followed by The Group (1963), the novel for which McCarthy is perhaps best known. The book, which follows eight Vassar women of the class of 1933 through their subsequent careers and the intellectual fads of the 1930s and '40s, became the most popular of all her works and was made into a film in 1966. McCarthy's controversial series of essays on the Vietnam War first appeared in the New York Review of Books and was later collected in Vietnam (1967) and Hanoi (1968). Her other books include the novel Birds of America (1971); The Mask of State (1974), on the Watergate affair; Cannibals and Missionaries (1979), a novel; and How I Grew (1987), a second volume of autobiography. An unfinished autobiography, Intellectual Memoirs, New York, 1936–38, was published posthumously in 1992. Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949–1975 (1995) is a record of McCarthy's long friendship with the German-born American political scientist and philosopher Hannah Arendt (Arendt, Hannah).